Tom McCarthy - C

On their way back to base, they strafe the German trenches. While Gibbs holds his line above them, Serge points his Lewis gun down and nudges it from side to side until its point seems to slot into their groove. A sixth sense tells him when he’s found it: he just feels it go in, somehow; when it does, it starts to play, the same track every time: of-PUR, pose-THAT, your-THOUGHT… Enemy gunfire crackles back at them like angry static. They reach the limit of their area, pull out and turn towards their own lines. The air over no-man’s-land is thick with cordite smoke: it has the rich, livery smell of homecoming. The kite balloon’s on the ground being deflated, the Popham strips rolled back up. The woods beside the airfield rustle as they skim them; the row of poplars bends the other way. Gibbs puts the wing down; the ground locks them in its drag; and then they’re taxiing across the field towards the Bessoneaus. Serge jumps out before the machine’s come to a complete standstill, while mechanics are still harnessing it with chocks and halters. With his brandy-flask and biscuit-box beneath his arm, he strolls towards the Nissen huts.

“Narrative, Carrefax.” The recording officer, seated behind a table with a stack of papers at the hangar’s exit, stops him.

“What?” asks Serge, taking his glove off and wiping his hand across his face.

“Flight narrative for Corps HQ. I have to remind you every time.”

“Oh,” says Serge. “Well…” His hand has gathered a thick wedge of tar. He looks at it, then up at the recording officer. “We went up; we saw stuff; it was good.”

Once, returning from the lines in fading light, zigzagging to dodge blue-black storm clouds, Serge and Gibbs find themselves landing on an aerodrome that’s not their own. They’re pretty sure it’s not a German one: the way the rain-curtains that sweep the ground are lit up, gold and precise with miniature rainbows in them, lets them know they’ve being flying west-but you can never be sure. The machines lying across the field are neither RE8s nor SE5s, and have storks painted on their fuselage. When Serge and Gibbs descend from theirs, mechanics greet them in a foreign language.

“Perdu la route…” one of them shouts.

“Oh, fuck!” snarls Gibbs. “Distract them while I climb back in and get my pistol. We can take off again before those others by the huts get over here.”

“They’re French,” Serge tells him.

“Français,” the mechanic nods-before, as though to prove it, launching into a rendition of “ La Marseillaise.” Four pilots saunter over and serve them glasses of eau-de-vie, then stroll away across the field towards two sleek black cars against which elegantly dressed ladies lean smoking cigarettes through long ivory holders.

“Bloody Cigognes,” snaps Clegg when Serge recounts the episode back in the mess. “Nothing but playboys: race-car drivers, fly-half of the national rugby team, the Compte de Trou-de-Cul. Balloon-busters: all they ever dare attack. Show them an EA and they’ll cack their French pantalons faster than the jardin de mon oncle. But soon as they get down from each day’s chicken run they’ve got Parisian hostesses whisking them off to see Manon and Salammbô while we sit here listening to scratched-up Felix Powell. There’s no justice in this war.”

The Felix Powell is pretty scratched, it’s true. So are the Marie Lloyd, the Vesta Tilley and the Ella Shields. As they play them in the evenings, some of the officers dance together, drawing lots to see who’ll do the woman’s steps; others, meanwhile, reminisce about the war’s “golden era”:

“Pity we don’t use parasols and Moranes anymore,” Watson sighs nostalgically. “Do you remember drop bags?”

“Those things were great fun,” Dickinson says. “You’d scrawl your message in them, then just hurl them overboard above the reporting station, watch them drop. Radio killed all that.”

“There was this pilot here when I first came,” Baldwick tells them. “Said he used to wave at EA pilots when he passed them. You had no beef with one another. He said the first time one of them took a pop at him, he couldn’t believe it: seemed so low…”

“What happened to him?” Watson asks.

“What do you think?” answers Baldwick. “Last year, or maybe late in ’fifteen. He was a flamer: carbonisé.”

“Carbo-nee-zay,” Dickinson and Watson repeat in unison, as though the word held some kind of mantric power, like an “Amen.”

“He was a real old-timer,” Baldwick tells them; “twenty-four or so.”

Baldwick is twenty, one year older than Serge; Watson, twenty-one. They could have been flying with the 104th before he was born, as far as he’s concerned. Each month is like a generation here. This makes the twenty-four-year-old who used to wave at passing Germans like a distant ancestor, belonging more to an order of stone reliefs, illuminated manuscripts and tapestries whose stories don’t quite lend themselves to comprehension than to any present in which Serge might also have a place. Mess talk is full of predecessors such as him: the dead get more attention than the living. Each week, one or two more airmen join their Olympiad; as new ones replace them, Serge and the others move up the ancestral chain, one generation with every arrival. Before they take off for Artillery Observation or Contact Patrol work, pilots and observers pool their wages in a small iron commode that’s been chosen for this purpose for a reason-a precise one, yet one whose particulars have become so subject to conjecture and apocrypha that they’ve grown obscure; if one of the men doesn’t come back, his portion buys the rest an outing to the Encas Estaminet in Vitriers.

The Encas’s décor is low-key. The walls of its two rooms are panelled with fly-brown mirrors; the zinc bar-top looks like it’s been reclaimed from a shot-down aeroplane or crashed Crossley truck, and hammered repeatedly in an attempt to flatten it that’s had the opposite effect: it’s all but impossible to keep a glass upright on its surface. The table tops are marble slabs that must have lost their lustre many years ago, worn down by greasy hands and dirty elbows, stained with wine. The whole place smells of spilt wine. Two waiters with hair so greasy that Gibbs once drunkenly accuses them of pilfering from the squadron’s engine-oil supplies move like slow spiders though a web of grey cigarette smoke that lingers as insistently as vapour trails and Archie-puffs above the battlefield.

“Hey, garsson!” Clegg says as one of them sets two bottles down in front of him. “Send two more to those homosexuals from the Eighty-ninth in the next room. Comprennay? Two bootay; ’omosexuelle, katrer-vangt-nerf…”

Serge explains in French to the waiter what Clegg means, and takes the bottles through himself. They often see the 89th men here; their aerodrome’s only four miles away. There’s one man named Carlisle whom Serge gets talking to each time they meet. Carlisle ’s neither a pilot nor an observer, but an artist. He was studying at the Slade before the war, and got assigned to camouflage work, devising a whole system based on Goethe’s theory of colours and applying it to machines, painting blue, violet and yellow stripes across their wings and fuselage-before discovering that these only camouflaged the planes when seen against the ground, an asset deemed of such limited value that it was scrapped after only two machines had been thus decorated. Rather than recall him, the war office has kept him out here as an official War Artist, on secondment to the 89th. He hasn’t taken to his new post well.

“It doesn’t work,” he moans as Serge pours him a glass. “It’s just not possible once you’re in flight.”