Daniel Torday - The Last Flight of Poxl West

My prevailing memory of that period, that stretch after the glee of our victory began to mature into a more nuanced emotion, came one day soon after. It was during another of our long card-playing evenings. Percy and I were big winners at whist. One of our fellow men, an officer called Berend, with whom Smith had had a close friendship, and who knew our history in S-Sugar, joked, “It’s nice to see two former enemies fighting alongside each other.”

Percy put his arm around me and said, “Former enemies is a little too harsh, don’t you suspect, Poxl?”

I breasted my cards.

“You two were in the same squadron, isn’t that right?” Berend said.

“We were stationed together north of Grimsby,” I said. “We flew together in the Battle of Hamburg.”

“Proper war heroes, at that!” Berend said.

Another officer with whom Percy had a long history and who knew about the bombings our wing undertook, Landsman, said, “Or something like that.”

Berend inquired after his meaning.

“We heard all about it,” Landsman said.

“All about what?” Percy said.

“The tens of thousands of German civilians killed in those bombings,” Landsman said.

“There were people killed in all the bombings!” Percy said. “They were bloody bombings! What were you, some radio operator down on the ground, you bloody moralizer, sitting back in your armchair with the WAAFs on your lap, sitting in judgment of those who saved you!”

Percy lunged at Landsman. Had I not been nearby to grab him, he might have done some damage. I didn’t know quite what had set him off. Perhaps Percy was unable to deal with the calm settling in after the final armistice. He was a career officer, one who seemed uncomfortable in the skin of civvy street, a prospect now arising for all of us. Regardless, with the help of this man Berend, I pulled him out of the Nissen hut. We took to a field nearby to smoke. Out among the fields, cicadas chirruped in the late-summer evening. Nightdew lifted off the Rhineland grass. Far above, the stars of Orion’s belt blinked. We walked long enough to smoke two cigarettes before Percy spoke.

“Bloody Landsman,” he said. He proceeded to explain that this officer had always been an antagonizer, always taking up the counterargument. The more silence fell in around us, the more the noise of cicadas filled the air. We kept walking. What in Landsman’s attitude had pushed Smith so far? I knew his stance on the need for a “press-on” attitude during our tour. He had little tolerance for the kind of self-doubt that could develop among pilots who weren’t inculcated into the military thinking he deemed acceptable. But the war was over. We were standing on occupied German soil. What losses we’d suffered, we’d endured, and now we had to try to move forward. As the cicadas chirruped in the dark I awaited his attack on my moralizing.

He was silent. Night birds called out from a stand of pines beyond the fields.

“There’s a lad on my detail,” Percy said. “Twenty-year-old called Schlict. Always yammering. Never made pilot, never got on a Luftwaffe bomber, stuck with a job as a firefighter at home.” Percy drew on his fourth cigarette since we’d left his altercation with Landsman. Only its red ember showed in the dark. “This boy talks. No matter how many times I’ve put him on the most menial duties, he cannot keep his Jerry mouth shut.”

Percy stomped out his cigarette and lit another.

“Early this week, he started in on how the war is over but that he doesn’t have a home. Started again about how he had been a firefighter. In Hamburg, he said. When it started the first night, he said, he took to a bomb shelter. Once the blockbusters finished falling, he went out into the firestorm.”

A steady breeze picked up out in the field. It forced a cloud across the moon. Percy took a drag off his cigarette. With one fag already lit in his mouth, he took another from the packet and played it over, end over end, in his hand.

“The main waterline in the city was broken by one of our bombs early that night. Schlict and the other firefighters had to go to the river to begin pumping from the source itself. There they saw hundreds of people diving into the water. Directly before his crew were four women. They’d been hit by incendiaries. Phosphorous was burning their arms and backs.

“One of those women kept running into the water to douse her arms. When she emerged, the phosphorous was so hot — burning to the bone — it would light itself again. She kept jumping into the water. Each time she got out, her arms would set themselves afire again. The way this Schlict described it: these women running into the water, screaming, coming out, igniting again. Over and over, until he and the other firefighters were able to get ahold of them, wrap them in fire blankets, and take them back to the station.”

Percy stopped. He took a long pull off his cigarette. The red ember at its end was dancing with the shaking of his hand.

“Phosphorous in those incendiaries could do that if it hit you,” Percy said. A hitch crept into his voice. “I told this Schlict kid to get back to work. To stop with his propaganda. Normally he would have started at me again, yammering until he’d had everyone convinced. For the first time since the lad had started talking, he stopped. I saw his pale face. He hardly even believed himself, the horror of this story he’d witnessed with his own seeing, remembering eyes. I could see him thinking, Maybe it hadn’t happened that way. So awful his mind allowed his memories to be undone.”

Percy stopped talking. A taste of bile was rising in my throat. I would like to think now maybe it was all the cigarettes we’d smoked. But maybe it was that up until that moment, no matter what we’d done, we’d assumed we were like the vast majority of men — like Lear himself — self-judged to be more sinned against than sinning. Now something was changing in both of us the more Smith talked. As I say, if you met him in life, years later, even Iago might have turned from his role. But it could work the other way, as well, couldn’t it? That line from The Merchant of Venice had crossed my mind many times in the years since Glynnis’s mother and I first read it: “If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” Somehow, I’d not thought quite clearly that this line had been uttered by one of Shakespeare’s great villains, not one of his great heroes.

We looked at the dancing of that red ember at the end of Percy’s cigarette.

“What I haven’t told you about the days back when we were in S-Sugar,” I said, “was why I signed up for the RAF.”

Percy didn’t say anything. I did. I talked to him about Glynnis Goldring and her mother. I told him about Johana and Scott Prichard. I told him about my parents and my long-since-passed desire to run Brüder Weisberg, and that I’d fled from Leitmeritz without ever saying good-bye to either of my parents, not knowing I would never again see them. If I had it in me in those days to cry, I might have cried, but I only said that now — now — I wanted to find Françoise as much as anything. I needed to know if she was still alive.

“None of it changes much for us, does it?” Percy said.

“How so?”

“We dropped those incendiaries ourselves, Poxl.”

I said I supposed we had. “But like you said in those moments before we went on our run,” I said. “We signed up to fight Nazis who had bombed us in London. We continued with ‘pressing on,’ as you put it. That’s never changed. Has it?”

Percy’s cigarette was bobbing. I reached out to steady his hand. He almost didn’t notice I’d touched him. In the darkness, we couldn’t see each other’s faces. We were out among night-wet grasses. Hardly a sound save for the swishing of our boots and all those chest-plated bugs we couldn’t see up in the treetops, vibrating their internal coils. We walked for another fifteen minutes over the landing strips we’d built, over dusty fields unpaved and past half-constructed radio towers and unused nacelles and Merlin engines of decommissioned planes left piecemeal at the base. Night smells of gathering dew and stoked fires carried across the grasses. We kept as far as we could from the lights and laughter in the Nissen huts without entering the forest on the other side. We were again approaching the distant glow.