always loses the bird he’s after in the clouds, or who never finds the foe and aborts the mission. One soon knows who they are. Nobody blames them. After a while they’re posted out.” He fell silent again, looking down at the smoking cigarette in his clasped hands, obviously absorbed in memory. He shifted in the chair again, and glanced up from Victor Henry to Pamela, who was watching his face tensely. “Well, the long and the short of it is, it’s us against the Jerries, Captain Henry, and that’s exciting. We’re flying these machines that can cross all of England in half an hour. Excellent gun platforms. Best in the world. We’re doing what very few men can do or ever have done. Or perhaps will ever do again.” He looked around at the elegant grillroom full of well-dressed women and uniformed men, and said with an uncivilized grin, the whites showing around his eyeballs, “If excelling interests you, there it is” — he made the thumb gesture — “up there.”
“Your orange squash, sir,” said the waiter, bowing.
“And just in time,” said Gallard. “I’m talking too much.”
Pug raised his glass to Gallard. “Thanks. Good luck and good hunting.”
Gallard grinned, drank, and moved restlessly in the chair. “I was an actor of sorts, you know. Give me a cue and I rant away. What does your son fly?”
“SBD, the Douglas Dauntless,” said Pug. “He’s a carrier pilot.”
Gallard slowly nodded, increasing the speed of his finger tattoo. “Dive bomber.”
“Yes.”
“We still argue a lot about that. The Jerries copied it from your navy. Our command will have no part of it. The pilot’s in trouble, we say, in that straight predictable path. Our chaps have got a lot of victories against the Stukas. But then again, providing they get all the way down, they do lay those bombs in just where they’re supposed to go. Anyhow, my hat’s off to those carrier fellows, landing on a tiny wobbly patch at sea. I come home to broad immovable mother earth, for whom I’m developing quite an affection.”
“Ah, I have a rival,” said Pamela. “I’m glad she’s so old and so flat.”
Gallard smiled at her, raising his eyebrows. “Yes, you’ve rather got her there, haven’t you Pam?”
During the meal, he described in detail to Victor Henry the way fighter tactics were evolving on both sides. Gallard got very caught up in this, swooping both palms to show maneuvers, pouring out a rapid fire of technical language. For the first time he seemed to relax, sitting easily in his chair, grinning with enthusiastic excitement. What he was saying was vital intelligence and Pug wanted to remember as much as possible; he drank very little of the Burgundy he had ordered with the roast beef. Pamela at last complained that she was drinking up the bottle by herself.
“I need all my steam, too,” Pug said. “More than Ted does.”
“I’m tired of abstemious heroes. I shall find myself a cowardly sot.”
Gallard was having his second helping of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding — he was eating enormously, saying that he had lost almost a stone in three weeks and proposed to make it up in three days — when the headwaiter came to him with a written note. Gallard crumpled it up, wiped a napkin across his mouth, and excused himself. He returned in a few minutes, smiled at them, and resumed eating.
“Pam, there’s been a change,” he abruptly said when his plate was empty. “Our squadron’s rest off ops is cancelled. We’ll get it when the weather’s a little cooler.” He smiled at Victor Henry and drummed ten fingers on the table. “I don’t mind. One gets fidgety, knowing the thing’s still going on full blast and one’s out of it.”
In the silence at the little table, Victor Henry thought that the ominousness of this summons went much beyond the riskiness of recalling and sending up a fatigued, edgy pilot. It signalled that the RAF was coming to the end of its rope.
Pamela said, “When do you have to go back? Tomorrow?”
“Oh, I’m supposed to be on my way now, but I was damned well going to enjoy this company, and my beef.”
“I shall drive you to Biggin Hill.”
“Well, actually, they’re digging the chaps out of various pubs and places of lesser repute, Pam. We’ll be going up together. Those of us they can find.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ll be cracking off soon, but the evening’s young. No reason for you not to go on to that Noel Coward show. I’ve heard it’s very funny.”
Quickly Pug said, “I think now’s the time for me to leave you both.”
The RAF pilot looked him straight in the eye. “Why? Don’t you think you could bear Pamela’s drunken chatter for another little while? Don’t go. Here she is all tarted up for the first time in weeks.”
“All right,” Pug said, “I think I can bear it.”
The pilot and the girl stood. Pamela said, “So soon? Well, we shall have a nice long stroll through the lobby.”
As Pug got up and offered his hand, Ted Gallard said, “Good luck to you, Captain Henry, and to that son of yours in the Dauntless dive bomber. Tell him I recommend orange squash. Come and see us at Biggin Hill aerodrome.”
Left alone at the table, Pug sat and wiped his right hand with a napkin. Gallard’s palm had been very wet.
He did visit Ted Gallard’s squadron, one afternoon a few days later. Biggin Hill lay southeast of London, squarely in the path of incoming German bombers from the nearest airfield across the Channel. The Luftwaffe was persisting in a fierce effort to knock out Biggin Hill, and the aerodrome was a melancholy scene: wrecked aircraft, burned-out roofless hangars, smashed runways, everywhere the inevitable stinks of burned wood, broken drains, blown-up earth, and smashed plaster. But bulldozers were snorting here and there, patching the runways, and a couple of planes landed as Pug arrived. On stubby fighters dispersed all over the field, mechanics in coveralls were climbing and tinkering, with much loud cheerful profanity. The aerodrome was very much in business.
Gallard looked very worn, yet happier than he had been in the Savoy Grill. In the dispersal hut he introduced Pug Henry to a dozen or so hollow-eyed dishevelled lads in wrinkled uniforms, fleece-lined boots and yellow life jackets, lounging about on chairs and iron cots, either bare-headed or with narrow blue caps tilted over one eye. The arrival of an American Navy captain in mufti dried up the talk, and for a while the radio played jazz in the awkward silence. Then one pink-cheeked flier, who looked as though he had never shaved, offered Pug a mug of bitter tea, with a friendly insult about the uselessness of navies. He had been shot down by a British destroyer in the Channel, he said, and so might be slightly prejudiced. Pug said that speaking for the honor of navies, he regretted the idiocy; but as a friend of England, he approved the marksmanship.
That brought a laugh, and they began talking about flying again, self-consciously for a while, but then forgetting the visitor. Some of the slang baffled him, but the picture was clear enough: everlasting alert, almost no sleep, too many airplanes lost in accidents as well as combat, far too many German fighters, and desperate, proud, nervous high spirits in the much reduced squadron. Pug gathered that almost half the pilots that had started the war were dead.
When the six o’clock news came on, the talk stopped and all huddled around the radio. It had been a day of minor combat, but again the Luftwaffe had come off second best in planes shot down, at a rate of about three to two.
The fliers made thumbs-up gestures to each other, boyishly grinning.
“They’re fine lads,” Gallard said, walking Victor Henry back to his car. “Of course, for your benefit they cut the talk about girls. I’m the middle-aged man of the squadron, and I get left out of it too, pretty much. When they’re not flying, these chaps have the most amazing experiences.”
He gave Pug a knowing grin. “One wonders how they manage to climb into their cockpits, but they do, they do.”
“It’s a good time to be alive and young,” Pug said.
“Yes. You asked me about morale. Now you’ve seen it.” At the car, as they shook hands, Gallard said diffidently. “I owe you thanks.”
“You do? Whatever for?”
“Pamela’s coming back to England. She told me that when they met you by chance in Washington, she was trying to make up her mind. She decided to ask you about it, and was much impressed by what you said.”
“Well, Im flattered. I believe I was right. I’m sure her father’s surviving nicely without her.”
“Talky? He’ll survive us all.”
“It’s not going well,” General Tillet said, maneuvering his car through a beetle-cluster of wet black taxicabs
