Tom McCarthy - C

“Oh, we couldn’t leave our machine unattended,” Stedman tells her in a solemn voice. “We’ll sleep right out here with it. It’s not cold…”

“Well, at least let us bring you sandwiches and a flask.”

“Too kind, madam,” Stedman answers. “I’ll come in and fetch them myself.”

It’s the tall one and the round-faced one who sneak out to see them after dark: two distinctive silhouettes making their way across the field. Stedman and the round-faced one do it on the grass beneath the lower wing; Serge helps the tall one into the nacelle, where, wrapping her arms around the Lewis gun (whose safety catch, fortunately, is on), she bends forward and lets him wriggle off her pants from behind. They leave at dawn. Over the following two weeks, three more planes lose parts above the same spot.

In all his time at Hythe, Serge sees two accidents. The first one happens right in front of him: he and Stedman are waiting to take off when Quinnell and Kirk, who’ve gone up just ahead of them, stall, go into a spin and hurtle back down to the airfield, landing in the right place but the wrong direction, nose-first. Kirk is killed; Quinnell’s spine is broken and he’s carted off to hospital in Dover. Their machine stays in the field for several days; the cadets gather round it every morning after breakfast to stare in contemplation at the strange and useless geometry of its upended beams, the decorative wind vanes of its rudders.

“It looks like the Eiffel Tower,” says Serge. “The Eiffel Tower if one of its legs snapped off and it started tilting.”

“Or an oil well,” Payton counters; “a slant one: those bits that they build above the ground to mount the pumps in.”

The other accident he doesn’t see take place-only its aftermath. Beswick forgets to strap himself into his seat and falls out when his pilot loops the loop. He plunges three thousand feet and lands in a nearby field. A Beswick-shaped mark stays in the grass for weeks: head, torso, legs and outstretched arms.

“The acid from his body,” Stedman says as he and Serge stand above the patch one afternoon. “Stops new grass growing.”

“It’s a good likeness,” Serge says.

“All his memories, and everything he ever thought about or did, reduced to battery chemicals.”

“Why not?” asks Serge. “It’s what we are.”

He’s passed out in June, and assigned to the 104th Squadron as an observer. He leaves from just down the road, in Folkestone, travelling on a hospital ship alongside several thousand troops, all armed.

“Isn’t that cheating?” Serge asks the loading sergeant when he sees the green strip and red cross painted on the hull.

“It’s what’s available,” the sergeant replies. “Came here for disinfection, needs to go to France. If you’d prefer to swim…”

They all embark, then for some reason disembark again, spend the night in a dirty hotel, then re-embark and set sail the next day. Serge wonders what disease the ship had on it before it was disinfected; he pictures it floating above the decks, licking its way around the stays and pulleys of the lifeboats’ gantries in a yellow cloud, like cholera. Arriving in Boulogne, he finds the whole dock area turned into one giant hospital ward, with sick men lying in rows on stretchers, waiting for evacuation. The landscape around the town looks sick too: trees droop languidly; fields that should be full of wheat at this time of year stand bare. Following the instructions he was handed before leaving Hythe, he joins a transport barge at a small inland jetty, and is carried slowly to Saint-Omer along melancholic waterways, past tin-roofed sheds on edges of ramshackle villages. Rusty cans and floating refuse strew the boat’s route like sarcastic flowers. Further down, the river opens out more, splitting into channels in which water-weeds stream indolently in long swathes below the surface. Sedge and bulrushes blur its edges; from within their dense thatch Serge can hear the calls of wild ducks, coots and herons sounding and responding cryptically across the water, as though issuing and forwarding their own sets of instructions. Over this noise, like a low mist, hangs the sound of guns, more substantial than it was in Hythe: the front may still be distant, but the rumble’s here now, graticuled, almost tangible…

The same melancholic lethargy prevails in Saint-Omer. All around town, men are sleeping: on benches and grass verges, outside cafés, on the requisitioned Pétanque court. Serge can’t tell if the omnipresent rumbling here is guns or snoring. He picks his way past eighteen or twenty legs sprawled out across the steps of the building he’s been ordered to report to, and finds a bored NCO sitting behind a table smoking cigarettes, one straight after the other.

“One hundred and fourth?” the NCO says when he reads the piece of paper Serge hands him. “They’re fully manned at the moment. You’ll have to wait.”

“What for?” Serge asks.

“Someone to die.” The NCO stubs out his cigarette and lights another before adding: “It shouldn’t take long.”

“What do I do while I wait?” Serge asks him.

“Sleep, have an omelette in the bistro, pick your nose-what do I care?”

Serge has an omelette in the bistro. He gets talking to some other RFC men awaiting deployment. They laugh when he tells them that he trained on Shorthorns.

“That’s like learning to drive horse-carts before being sent out in a motor-car race!”

“What did you learn in?” Serge asks.

“Well, we started out on Longhorns, then moved on to Avros.”

“An Avro is a pile of shit,” another man says. “Its ailerons are useless, it stalls on right turns and it’s got no elevator. Three of the cadets I trained with died on them while I was there.”

“We lost three too,” Serge says. “Only one was just crippled.”

“We lost five!” the first man asserts triumphantly, thrusting his spread fingers out across the table top. “And two more have died just in the time that I’ve been here.”

“How?” Serge asks.

“This flight sergeant went out swimming and drowned in a deep pool. And then another man got crushed unloading coal.”

“There was another one too,” a third man chips in. “Got shot through the heart when someone else’s gun went off.”

“That was his own gun,” a fourth man says.

“No, that was another man who died the week before,” the third man corrects him.

Serge, chewing on his omelette, wonders if it’s really necessary to fight the Germans after all: they could all just lounge around, each on their own side, dying in random accidents until nobody’s left and the war’s over by default… He does a brief tour of the town after his meal, then settles down beside a pond in the main square and, gazing at a lotus flower lying on its surface, drifts off like everybody else.

He spends the next few days like this: reporting to the smoking NCO each morning, eating in the bistro, wandering, dozing. Eventually, on the fourth or fifth day, the NCO informs him that a squadron slot’s become available for him. He’s taken in a Crossley lorry alongside ten others. They sit in the back, on cushions that do little to absorb the shock and rattle of steel-studded tires on cobbled roads. The air smells of castor oil; Serge can’t tell if it’s the lorry or the landscape. The landscape is vast and empty; skylarks cut across it, making for no spot or destination that he can discern. At one point they pass a group of Hindu soldiers bathing in a stream. Three of them are splashing around, calling to each other in their language; two more stand facing outwards, backs to the road, their lower halves submerged while their cupped hands scoop water up and hold it aloft in a kind of votive gesture before pouring it across their foreheads. Every so often the lorry stops, the driver calls a name out and a man slips off to become swallowed by the terrain as the Crossley trundles on. Serge finds himself among the last three left in the back; then the last two; then the last one. The driver cuts the ignition and steps down to the ground to take a leak. With the engine’s noise gone, Serge can hear the front’s rumble loud and clear; it makes the truck’s metal bars vibrate against the wood. The driver, as he heads back to his cabin, turns to him and says: