The Complete Flying Officer X Stories (16 page)

In many other things Anderson and Auerbach were not the same. Anderson was very much the young blood whose life was split fairly evenly between flying and girls, and his leaves were beautiful and wild. Auerbach had married an English girl and was now a settled man. He sometimes looked rather shy, and there was a record of how once, before he was married, he had taken a girl out for the evening
and how, in the darkness, coming home, he had kissed her on the forehead.

All that late spring and early summer Anderson and Auerbach flew together. It was one of those periods in a station when the unity and life of a good squadron becomes too strong to remain a local thing, compressed within itself, meaning something to only a few people. It breaks out, and spreading, warm and energetic and fluid, becomes a large thing, meaning something to many people. It was one of those periods when everything was good. The weather was good and calm and sunny, the sea-light lofty and pure over the sea by day. The nights were good and starry, with no ground mist and just the right cover of cloud. The squadron was good and proud and knew itself. The things it did were good and the news of its doings were in the papers. Whenever you came into the mess or the billiard-room or the dining-room and heard laughter boiling over too richly you knew it was that squadron laughing. You knew by their laughter that they wanted nothing else than to be kept as they were, flying by night together, shooting up trains on the flat lands of northern France, shooting down careless Dormers over their own aerodromes. They had found each other. The positive and exuberant feeling of their discovery spread over the station, from Erks to W.A.A.F.'s and from W.A.A.F.'s to officers, until all of us felt it there.

But the best of all that feeling came from Anderson and Auerbach. Every night Anderson and Auerbach flew out over northern France, separately, to wait for enemy
bombers coming home from raids in England. And every morning, when we came down to breakfast, long before Anderson and Auerbach were up, we heard only one question. It was not “What is there for breakfast?” or “What is in the papers?” as if we had any fond ideas that either would be any different from the morning before, but only “How many did Anderson and Auerbach shoot down?”

When that spring began Anderson and Auerbach had each shot down nine aircraft, all by day. The weather in the winter had been very bad. The long period of inaction began to be broken in the month of April. It had then been a long time since either Anderson or Auerbach had shot anything down. Now they began to shoot something down almost every night. It struck me that what they were doing was very like poaching: something of the same instinct took them alone, across channel, to roam craftily above the dromes of northern France, waiting for stray victims. It was only in the way they did this that they seemed, as always and in almost everything else, very different. Anderson's way was to choose an aerodrome and fly to it and impatiently fly round it, waiting for the drome lights to be switched on and watching for the navigation light of returning bombers. If the light did not come on very soon, he lost eagerness and flew away to another drome, always impatient and volatile and eager until something happened, always furious and blasphemous when nothing did.

But all that Auerbach did was to wait. Auerbach had
patience. It was the patience of craftiness: of the man who sits above a rabbit hole, waiting to strike. Auerbach had come through Czechoslovakia and the Mediterranean and North Africa and France for the purpose of striking, and now, as I looked at it, a few moments more waiting would not matter. So it was Anderson, they said, who had the brilliance and Auerbach, they said, who had the luck; whereas it was really only the difference between a man who had infinite patience and one who had none at all.

So almost every morning, by one or two and sometimes three aircraft, we heard that Anderson and Auerbach had raised the score; and almost every noon I used to see Anderson and Auerbach themselves, getting up after their late sleep. What they told me and the way they told it was, as always, very different.

About noon Auerbach was always in the billiard-room. He was not particularly good, but he played like a clown in a circus and there was always a crowd watching him. He had a droll and magnetic way of laughing, and the laughter in the billiard-room used to bubble over when Auerbach was there.

“Nice going,” I would say. “What were they?”

“I think all Dornier 217's. I'm not sure. Perhaps one Heinkel 111.”

“Very nice.”

“Peez of cake.”

Every noon, while Auerbach was playing billiards, Anderson was on the terrace of the house, sun-bathing, alone. Auerbach used to say very little. He used to give a wink
and a nod and a flick of his thumb and it was an understanding between us: the common language that needed no elaboration. But Anderson, lying back on the cream stone terrace, eyes shaded against the sun, his moustache looking more corn-brown and more English than ever against his naked body, liked to talk about what happened. “Yes, and Auerbach got three! Two Dorniers and a Heinkel and a probable, the sod. God, he has the luck. There I stayed over the same drome for twenty minutes and not a sausage. Five minutes after I leave it Auerbach comes and they light up the whole bloody Christmas tree.”

“Luck,” I said.

“Luck, hell,” he said. “He's got some sixth sense or something. He knows which bloody drome they'll use and when they'll use it.”

“Just crafty,” I said. “You can see it in his eyes.”

“Crafty as hell,” he said.

“And you?” I said. “I hear you got one.”

“One solitary 217. They switched all the bloody drome lights on and there they were, as big as hell, about a dozen of them. Then as soon as I hit him they put everything out and I was finished.”

“You must be equal with Auerbach now,” I said.

“No, he's one up on me. The lucky sod, he's always one up on me.”

“Tomorrow you'll probably get six,” I said.

“Me?” he said. “The only time I ever see six is when the bloody ammo runs out.”

What he said turned out to be true. The next night he saw twenty and the light of the drome and the lights of the bombers were like the lights of a party round a Christmas tree. Anderson went in with great excitement and began to line them up. He hit the first Dornier at only a hundred feet, and she blew up underneath him almost before he had time to pull out of the dive. There is something about being hit at a hundred feet which does not seem to be in the rules, and the confusion must have been very great. The lights of the drome continued to burn as brilliantly as ever and the lights of the incoming bombers were not switched off. All Anderson had to do was to turn and come in again and hit a Heinkel. He saw it crash in wreaths of orange fire in the black space beyond the circle of light. Then he hit another and he saw it, too, burning among the lights, as if something in the Christmas tree had fallen and caught fire. Even then the lights of the drome still kept burning and the bombers circled round like coloured fireflies. It was all so fantastic, with the red and white light shining in the darkness and the coloured lights moving in the sky and the orange fires breaking the darkness, that Anderson could not believe it to be true. It was only when he had the fourth bomber lined up and pressed the tit and nothing happened except a fraction of a second burst that he knew the ammo was spent and it was real after all.

I do not know how many Auerbach got that night, but by the end of May he and Anderson were still almost equal, and by the beginning of June what they did was
in the papers every day. The papers had their photographs too, and I suppose the photographs were something like them. But what the papers printed was really a comic story. It was the story of two men with eagle eyes, though sometimes it was cat's eyes and sometimes it was hawk's eyes, who stalked over France every night in the darkness. We liked especially the word “stalk,” since it is the one thing an aeroplane does not do, and thinking of the clear, youthful, exuberant eyes of Anderson and of the crafty, friendly blue eyes of Auerbach, we liked the nonsense about the eyes. From the newspapers you got the impression that Anderson and Auerbach were a pair of very heroic bandits who behaved with copybook courage and were in some way supernatural. This attitude was perhaps excusable, since the newspapers never saw Anderson lying naked in the sun, blaspheming about the luck of Auerbach, or Auerbach playing snooker, with a laughing audience who got more fun out of Auerbach potting the black than they got out of his putting a Heinkel down.

It was excusable because, after all, the newspapers could not know the feeling that comes from a squadron which is at the crest of things: the warm and positive excitement that we felt all that spring and which went on expanding and flowing outward all that summer. They did not know about Auerbach playing billiards and comic games of snooker, or about his kissing a girl on the forehead in the dark. They did not know about Anderson lying on his back in the sun and looking at the green
summer leaves and the green grass spreading to the foot of the dark hills, and saying, a little solemnly, because this was his first year in England since the war began: “You can't believe how bloody wizard it is. You can't know what it is to see the leaves so green in the trees.”

There seemed no reason why this feeling and this squadron, and above all why Anderson and Auerbach, should not have gone on for ever. There seemed no reason why Anderson and Auerbach should ever stop those simple and disastrous journeys over France. But there comes a time when every squadron is held to have earned its rest; when some obscure department somewhere, by something written in a paper, breaks a tension and a feeling that can never be put on paper at all.

And finally it was time to say good-bye on an evening in July. The weather had broken suddenly and the wind blew cold and gusty between the dispersal huts on the drome, raising dry clouds of sand. The Hurricanes were lined along the perimeter. The pilots were not very happy, but they pretended to be very happy and the sergeant pilots fondled the busts of each other's Mae Wests and said heavy farewells. There were many people there to say good-bye. We shook hands with everybody again and wished them luck, and then the take-off was delayed and we shook hands with everyone again. We all promised to write and knew that we should never keep the promises. Anderson addressed the pilots in language as if they were going to play football, and we all said good-bye once more. Then for the second time the take-off was
delayed and the little W.A.A.F.'s who had at last begun to dry their tears began to cry all over again.

It was only when the take-off had begun at last that I realised that Auerbach was not there. Auerbach was going one way, the squadron another. Auerbach had not come to say good-bye. The Hurricanes flew once round the drome, in two flights of six, black against the grey evening sky, gradually formating. The little W.A.A.F.'s cried a little harder and the wind blew a little harder in a grey wave over the leaves of the potato patch beside the hut. I lifted my hand and drove away.

At the mess I found Auerbach alone. The anteroom was almost empty and there was no one laughing in the billiard-room.

“You didn't come,” I said to Auerbach.

“No.”

“You don't like good-byes,” I said.

“No.” He looked at me with the tender and now serious blue eyes that the newspapers had been vainly trying for weeks to describe. “No. I do not like fuss,” he said. “No fuss.”

I did not say anything. I walked away and into the garden. The grass and the leaves and the meadows under the hills were still green, but it was no longer the wonderful green of early summer. I walked across the grass and looked up at the empty sky and realised suddenly that something had gone.

All summer there had been something in the air. It was there no longer now.

The sea moved away below us like a stream of feathers smoothed down by a level wind. It was grey and without light as far as we could see. Only against the coast of Holland, in a thin line of trimming that soon lost itself in the grey coasts of the North, did it break into white waves that seemed to remain frozen between sea and land. Down towards Channel the sun, even from six thousand feet, had gone down at last below long layers of cloud. They had been orange and blue at first, then yellow and pale green, and then, as they were now, entirely the colour of slate. Above them there was nothing but a colourless sky that would soon be dark altogether.

There had been snow all over England that week. For two nights it had drifted against the huge wheels of the Stirlings, in scrolls ten feet high. The wind had partially swept it from the smooth fabric of fuselages as it fell and then frost had frozen what remained of it into uneven drifts of papery dust. In the mornings gangs of soldiers worked at the runways, clearing them to black-white roads edged with low walls of snow, and lorries drove backwards and forwards along them, taking away like huge blocks of salt the carved-out drifts. In two more days the thaw came and yellow pools of snow-water lay in the worn places of the runways. It froze a little again late at night, leaving a muddy skin of ice on pools that looked dangerous with the sunlight level and cold on them in the early morning. It wasn't dangerous really and the wheels of the Stirlings
smashed easily through the ice, splintering it like the silver glass toys on a Christmas tree. Then in the daytime the pools thawed again and if you watched the take-off from the control tower through a pair of glasses you saw the snow-water sparkle up from the wheels like brushes of silver feathers.

And now, beyond the hazy coast of Holland, with its thin white trimming that grew less white in the twilight as we flew towards it, we could see what reports had already told us. There was snow all over Europe. The day was too advanced to see it clearly. All you could see was a great hazy field of cotton-wool that had fewer marks on it than a layer of cloud. Far ahead of us, south and southwest and east, it ceased even to be white. It became the misty, colourless distances of all Europe, and suddenly as I looked at it, for almost the last time before darkness hid it altogether, I thought of what it would be like to fly on, southward, to the places I had never seen, the places without flak, the places in sunshine, the places beyond the war and the snow. It was one of those detached ideas that you get when flying, or rather that get you: a light-headed idea that seems to belong to the upper air and is gone as soon as its futility has played with you.