Tom McCarthy - C

It seems that the dead are there (dead are there).

Serge doesn’t know the words, but kind of murmurs as he half-mouths to them, rising with the others for the second verse:

So stand by your glasses steady,

The world is a web of lies (of lies).

Then here’s to the dead already,

And hurrah for the next man who dies (man who dies)!

After the meal, they crank up a gramophone and play music-hall songs. Serge slips out and makes his way in the dark through long grass, then across the shorter grass beside the woods, back to his houseboat. He sits on its deck and watches another barge slide through the oily water, laden once more with objects whose shapes beneath the covering suggest broken and twisted metal, or perhaps animals, the bumps and folds of their limbs and torsos. In the waves left by its passage when it’s gone, Serge sees a water rat swimming towards the far bank. The black surface of the water around the rat’s head is laced with garish streaks of colour: orange-yellow, greenish white, reflections of the gunfire flickering across the sky. The sound of each volley arrives late, often after its own flash has faded from both sky and river; new waves of flashes catch up with the residual noise, overtake and lap it.

“Intermission,” Serge says, to no one, or perhaps the rat.

For a moment, the flickering stops and the whole countryside falls silent. A calcium flare descends noiselessly not far away, silhouetting the poplars and rimming their leaves with frozen light, as though with hoarfrost. Behind it other, smaller lights glow on and off, like fireflies. Then their pops arrive, then louder stutters, then high, booming eruptions: sounds and lights meshing together as the air comes back to life, like a magnificent engine warming up.

Zero hour today is 7 a.m. Serge is up two hours before it, woken by the plash of a tug’s wake against his houseboat’s hull. He performs his ablutions, makes his way over to the mess and eats two slices of dry toast washed down with gunfire tea. Fifteen or so other pilots and observers shuffle into seats around him, bleary-eyed, coughing and farting themselves towards full consciousness. Cigarettes are smoked throughout the meal, stabbed into mouths still full with food, balanced on the sides of plates, stubbed out in hollow eggshells. Walpond-Skinner marches in at six to hand out copy orders.

“Five machines on Art Obs today; three SE5s escorting them. Four batteries to each machine: two to be ranged in the first hour, two in the second, all four kept on target during the third. Individual calls on all your sheets.”

Serge glances down at his. His batteries are E through H, his own call 3. The print on his paper is mauve and imprecise: third in a CC’d triplicate, the furthest from the ribbon and keys’ touch. Beneath the copy order sheet, on whiter and less grainy paper that’s been folded and compressed, is a large map. Serge opens it across the table top and sees, among grid squares bent out of line by cup and toast-rack, his objectives marked with arrows, their coordinates written beside them in red ink: two hostile batteries, an ammunition dump, a crossroads. The dump and crossroads are new for him; the batteries he’s been targeting for over a week now, on and off.

“Memo from Central Wireless Station: ground operators still reporting too much jambing,” Walpond-Skinner reads. “Keep to the wavelengths and notes that you’ve been allotted. And make sure you’re always half a mile-at minimum-from the next machine. Any questions?”

His eyes skirt the floor; the men’s eyes do the same.

“Then up, Bellerophons, and at ’em!” Walpond-Skinner snaps.

Chairs slide back, cups are swilled from and abandoned, burps sounded like last calls above remains of plates; then the men trudge outside. The sun’s not up yet; dew still hangs about the long grass; the odd strand of spider-web filament floats just above this: it’s not cold. The mildness of the summer morning makes the behaviour of the men as they slip into thick leather jackets, gloves and fur-lined boots seem quite incongruous. The pilots and observers of the SE5s are pulling muskrat gauntlets over the silk inners on their hands and feet and rubbing whale oil on their cheeks and foreheads: they’ll be flying much higher. In the field beside them, mechanics pace round the machines, patting their tails and engines as though leading greyhounds or racehorses to their starting boxes. Serge’s RE8 is near the pack’s rear; Gibbs is already inside it. Serge climbs into its back seat, wedges the biscuit-box and brandy-flask that he’s been carrying under his right arm in between the spark set and its six-volt battery, gives the Lewis gun a swivel, then eases himself into a dew-damped seat as the mechanics throw propellers into motion all around the field, cutting arrowhead-shaped streaks into the grass where it’s blown down in diagonal lines behind the wings.

They take off to the west, then turn across the wood, skimming the treetops. The poplars opposite the houseboats bend as they pass over them. Gibbs puts one wing down; for a while the machine seems to drag, as though still connected psychologically if not physically to the ground. Serge feels gravity tautening around him, like elastic. Then the wing rises, the elastic snaps and he’s flung, back first, into the sky. It feels like falling, not ascending-but falling upwards, as if sucked towards some vortex so high that it’s above height itself. The land accelerates away, its surface area expanding even as it shrinks. Gibbs levels the plane; the countryside slants till it’s horizontal and starts running from beneath the fuselage like a ticker-tape strip issuing from a telegraph machine, the flickering band of the Lys racing away beside a thicker belt of forest, villages and hamlets popping up to punctuate the strip like news reports or stock-price fluctuations before Nieppe’s large brown stain pushes these out to the margins. A heat bump throws them as Gibbs angles up again; the landscape shakes beneath them and becomes illegible, just for a moment, before settling back into its horizontal run, its centre perfectly aligned with the plane’s tail. The bumps continue till they clear a haze that’s been invisible up to now: it always is when they’re inside it. As it sinks from him like a pneumatic platform being lowered, Serge can make its upper surface out, clear-cut and definite, a second horizon hovering like a muslin cover just above the first…

They pass a kite balloon. It, too, seems to strain upwards, pulling at the winch-line tethering it to its truck. Serge waves to the man in its basket; one of the man’s hands flies up in response; the other clasps the basket’s rail, as though to hold him back. The front can’t be far now. Gibbs turns the machine round and Serge, now facing east, looks down onto a vapour blanket that’s darker and more murky. Through it, further off, he can see gun flashes twinkling all around the countryside in little points of blue flame. Flares glow down in the trenches. A mile or two behind the German ones, the white plume of a train forms a clear, silky thread. He runs his eye along its tracks, the telephone lines beside these, the cables of a bridge, a pipeline leading from this across open ground before it burrows down to carry out of sight the metal and electric musculature of the land. A new flash appears on the horizon and grows brighter, dazzling him and warming his face: sunrise. Serge takes his watch out: twenty-two minutes to seven, time to test the sigs…

Reaching down between his legs, he turns the aerial crank. He pauses after a few revolutions, looks over the side and sees the copper aerial trailing in the slipstream like a fishing reel, a lead weight at its end. He takes his spark set out and starts transmitting B signals to Battery E. They pass the kite balloon again, heading the other way, then fly over a pockmarked village, a road down which a transport column’s moving, then some woods until they find, nestled among these, the battery. The Popham strip’s already laid out for him on the ground: three white cloth lines, one upright like a backbone, the other two angled into this like a lesser-than sign to form a K. Serge turns round, taps Gibbs on the shoulder and gives him the thumbs-up; they turn and fly out east again.