Tom McCarthy - C

“May as well join me up front.”

The road ahead is split. As Serge climbs inside, the driver’s looking down first one fork, then another. He has a map in front of him, but he’s not consulting it: instead, he’s sitting still and listening, ears perked, as though homing in on some signal lodged in the guns’ static. He seems to find what he was listening out for, sparks the ignition up again, heads down the left fork and trundles on.

Eventually they turn off at a farm and bump along the ruts of a small, winding track. The track leads between two colonnades of poplars, passes a potato field, then runs down to an L-shaped airfield flanked by woods.

“The runway’s got cows grazing on it!” Serge says.

“You want it to look like an aerodrome?” the driver asks. “Besides, they keep the grass down.”

At the woods’ edge, Serge can see a large Bessoneau hangar with about ten machines drawn up inside it. They look much solider than Shorthorns; their fuselage is brown and has concentric circles painted on the side. From this angle, it looks as though their propellers have been placed at the wrong end. Some eighty yards away, beside a small copse, more planes are parked inside a makeshift hangar topped with canvas. Nissen huts are planted thirty feet from this, near a farmhouse with red gables. The driver draws up by the farmhouse’s front porch and lets Serge out.

The 104th Squadron’s commander’s name is Walpond-Skinner. He must be in his mid-forties. He seems pressured, and avoids eye contact.

“How many flying hours have you got?” is his first question when Serge steps into his office.

“I’m not sure, sir. Maybe twenty.”

“Jesus Christ! Like feeding children up to Baal. I see they’re still only giving you half-wings.”

Serge runs his fingers over the badge on his lapel: a single wing with a round O beside it.

“That’ll change soon,” Walpond-Skinner says, his gaze travelling on past Serge to flit across the wall and doorway. “You people are just as important. In the early days it was the observer who was in command of the machine; pilot was just a chauffeur.”

“Early days?” Serge asks.

Commander Walpond-Skinner’s eyes alight on Serge’s for the first time as he answers, with a bemused look:

“Of the war. At least now they’re giving you full officer status. As they should. I see you boys as grand interpreters. High priests.” He leafs through a dossier, then says: “From Lydium, Masedown.”

“Near there, sir,” Serge answers.

“Train on Salisbury Plain?”

“No: Hythe.”

“That’s strange. Says here you have a good eye. And a protector among the Whitehall gods. Let’s hope you haven’t skimped on hecatombs of late.”

Serge doesn’t answer. Walpond-Skinner taps a bell lying on his desktop. He flips open a black ledger, takes a rubber and erases something from it, then continues:

“We have three flights here; six machines in each. You’ll be in C-Flight. Any questions?”

“I don’t think so,” Serge says.

A batman arrives and is instructed to escort Serge to “the Floaters.” As he leaves, Walpond-Skinner wipes the rubber residue from the ledger’s page, picks up a pen lying beside it, then, realising his mistake, sets it down again in favour of a pencil, with which he writes on the spot he’s just cleared, murmuring:

“Carrefax, C-eee.”

The batman leads Serge across the field. Outside the Nissen huts he sees a group of men in pilots’ jackets standing as though on parade-although they’re scruffily dressed and their formation isn’t one he’s ever learnt: it seems to consist of four men planting themselves in a kind of square, all facing inwards, then each rotating forty-five degrees (two in a clockwise direction, two anti-) to face down the square’s side, towards the man positioned at an adjacent corner, whereupon the two sets of two men start to circle one another in slow pasodobles, before looping round and rejoining the square with each man at a different corner so that, while the positions shift, the overall formation stays the same.

“If he turns left,” one of the men is saying, “you turn right. If he turns right, you turn left. If he then turns left after that, you turn left too; and if he turns right, you turn left as well.”

The men act these moves out, pacing and turning, as he speaks.

“You mean right,” another of them says, halting in his tracks. The whole formation grinds to a halt too. The first man continues:

“No, I mean left. Then you come back at him from below the tail.”

The belt of internal movement shuffles into action once again. Serge follows the batman on towards the woods at the field’s edge. Taking a little path through these, they come to a row of houseboats moored on a canalised section of river.

“This is your one, sir,” the batman tells him as he ducks through a low doorframe. Inside, there’s a small stove, a bookshelf and four beds. Three of the beds are in a state of disarray, with sheets pulled back and clothes flung across them; the fourth is neatly made, and has a package bound with string lying on its surface.

“… should have been sent to his family already,” the batman mutters. “I’ll take it. Why don’t you settle in, then I can show you round the airfield.”

Serge unpacks, then steps onto the deck. On the canal’s far side another row of slender poplars sways lightly above reeds that bend over the water. The poplars’ leaves are dancing, but Serge can’t hear the rustle: the guns’ noise is loud here-loud and precise, its tangled thunder now unravelled into distinct volleys and retorts. A scow passes by, carrying scrap or machine parts covered by tarpaulin. Its captain looks at Serge, then at his load, then dead in front.

He’s taken to the Bessoneau hangar first. Machine parts lie around this too: propellers, wheels and engine cylinders, sorted into groups or mounted on laths and workbenches over which mechanics bend and solder as though studying and dissecting specimens. Towering above these are the aeroplanes he saw from the lorry: large, brown solid things with no nacelle, just a scooped-out hollow in the fuselage between the wings with two seats in it.

“RE8s,” the mechanic informs him, tapping an exhaust pipe running above a set of gill-like silver slits. “Hispano-Suiza engine, air-cooled.”

“Why’s the engine at the front?” Serge asks.

“The RE8’s a tractor, not a pusher.”

“Doesn’t the propeller block the observer’s view?”

“Observer sits in the back, facing backwards.”

“Backwards?” Serge asks. “How can I see where we’re going?”

“You can see where you’ve come from,” the mechanic smiles back. “Don’t worry: you’ll come to like it. It’s a great, sturdy machine. Both the pilot and the observer can get killed and it’ll fly on for a hundred miles and land itself quite safely back on our side of the lines-if it’s facing that way, of course; bit of a disaster if it’s not…”

They stroll on to the Nissen huts, and Serge is introduced to the other pilots and observers.

“This is Gibbs, then Watson, Dickinson, Baldwick, Clegg…”

The men are dressed in non-uniform shirts unbuttoned halfway down the front. Their hair is grown out in long locks. They greet him casually.

“Which flight you in, then?” Clegg asks.

“C-Flight.”

“Aha: you’re hosting us tonight. Better break out the good stuff.”

The good stuff turns out to be local dessert wine with a glowing yellow hue and bittersweet taste. As they hold their glasses up, the men sing:

We meet neath the sounding rafters;

The walls all around us are bare (are bare);

They echo the peals of laughter;