Sagittarius Rising
excerpts...2
My mother came down to say goodbye. She behaved as all good mothers should, gave me a cigarette case, talked of everything except the front, adjured me to write regularly, said she was not going to worry as I was quite certain to come through all right, and said goodbye at the station without breaking down. Seventeen is not a grateful age. So much is taken for granted. The parent's care and solicitude become a burden to be cast off. So I record with some remorse how little that parting meant. I was full of the new life, and utterly failed to grasp the blank my going would leave, the daily searching through the long casualty lists, the daily listening for the knock which might mean a word, a line, some message, however meagre, from "somewhere in France".
I was rather relieved to have her gone, for I dreaded a scene. I was as certain as she that I should come through all right, and that being so, why get emotional over a temporary separation ? But, all the same, the truth was that the average length of a pilot's life at that time was three weeks. I was hopelessly inequipped and inexperienced.
Later, no pilot was allowed to cross the lines before he had done sixty hours' flying -- I had done thirteen. There was every excuse for a last farewell; but, mercifully, we did not know it. It is only now I can look back, judge of the hazards, and get a vague idea of the miracle that passed me through those years unscathed. She had made me have my photograph taken, too, and I hated it! The only one I cared about showed the Wings prominently; but, of course, she liked another, in profile, where they did not show at all -- liked the expression, she said. Sentimental, mothers were; but she was proud too. I was not to know that photo was to stand on her desk if "anything happened", for her to say; "This was my son!" and try to find something to justify a belief in the worthiness of my death when, in her heart, she knew that the world could never be richer or nobler for butchering a million of its sons. -- p21
The sight of poison gas
As I turned to come back from the lines one evening, I saw to the north of Thiepval a long creeping wraith of yellow mist. I stared for a moment before I realised: gas! Then instinctively, although I was a mile above the earth, I pulled back the stick to climb higher, away from the horror.
Men were dying there, under me, from a whiff of it: not dying quickly, nor even maimed or shattered, but dying whole, retching and vomiting blood and guts; and those who lived would be wrecks with seared poisoned lungs, rotten for life.
I stared at the yellow drift, hypnotised. I can see it at this moment as clearly as I could that day, for it remains with me as the most pregnant memory of the war. It was, in fact, the symbol of our enlightened twentieth century: science, in the pursuit of knowledge, being exploited by a world without standards or scruples, spiritually bankrupt.
Today all treaties, conventions, leagues, all words of honour, contracts, obligations are evidently worth nothing once the lust for power has infected a nation. Within twenty years of these days of which I write, every country, under a veneer of self-righteous nationalism, is preparing, with increased ingenuity and deadlier weapons, a greater Armageddon—all the while protesting their love of peace.
People who cannot learn from their mistakes are damned --'the state of them who love death more than life'. What have we learned from ours? We are, collectively, the most evil and destructive of human creatures. We back up our greeds and jealousies with religion and patriotism. Our Christian priests bless the launching of battleships, our youth is urged to die gloriously 'for king and country'. We even write on the tomb of our Unknown Warrior that he died 'for God'! What a piece of impudent and blasphemous nonsense to write in the house of him whose greatest saying was: 'This is my commandment, that ye love one another.'
The next war will see that yellow drift not stealing down into front-line dug-outs, but along London streets. My breed, the pilots, whose war has been more chivalrous and clean-handed than any other, will be ordered to do violence to the civilian population. We shall drop the gas bombs and poison the reservoirs. We shall kill the women and children. Of course the thing is insane; but then if the world submits to the rule of homicidal maniacs, it deserves to be destroyed.
For, intellectually, the problem is not insoluble, though it is vast and has been rushed on us in under a hundred years, that is practically instantaneously. Science is the first cause; but scientists wash their hands of it, saving they are bound to advance knowledge, but cannot control the uses men put it to. But if there is to be any safety in the world, dangerous inventions will have to be protected as carefully as dangerous poisons.
To nearly every modern problem there is an intellectual answer; but that, unfortunately, is not enough, for we have passions as well as minds, and they are more difficult to educate.
We are aware, for instance, that the incredibly rapid development of communications has telescoped space and time. We know that prosperity is interdependent, that currencies are linked, that commerce is international. But only a few (mainly business men whose pockets are affected) take all this for granted. They demand, as a matter of common sense, that international relations should have international control. For the rest it is an ideal, not an urgent practical necessity. The general public remains isolationist, patriotic, aware (like Nurse Cavell) that patriotism is not enough, but aghast at the problem of co-ordinating and controlling the life of the planet.
So vital a division puts everything in flux. Nobody knows where to pin their faith, so they believe nothing. Moral and social standards are confused. Disillusion, introspection, defeatism are the lot of all those who can only live by the yardstick of black and white. The fear of feeling the ground slipping from under their feet drives whole nations back into medieval despotism. They will submit to anything sooner than face this social relativity where nothing is straight, nothing constant, nothing sure. But emulating the ostrich, though it may bring relief for a space, does not solve the problem. It leads straight back to self-immolation on the altar of outworn patriotism, that is to barbarism.
Thus the rational solution, as yet unsupported by the emotional drive which would make it a common faith, a cardinal necessity not to be denied, drifts in the doldrums, while the hysterical crew wring their hands and pray for a fair wind, instead of manning the boats and rowing the ship out to the trades.
And all this arises because the ideal remains apparently unattainable, nebulous; it has not crystallised into a single urge. Yet this is clear and simple: world state, world currency, world language. It will demand new disciplines, new allegiances, new ideals. Probably two or three more world wars will be necessary to break down the innate hostility to such changes; but that is the way it must go.
The days will come when the nations, sick of fighting themselves to a standstill, will claim the protection of the International Guard as we claim the right to a policeman. It is a question only of degree. Peace and security are civic virtues: those who disturb them must be quickly dealt with, and if their offence is serious enough, put out of the way.
It is a fight between intellect and appetite, between the international idea and armaments. The latter will probably win the first two or three rounds; but, if civilisation is to survive, the idea must win in the end. Meanwhile, if a few million people have to die violent deaths, that cannot be helped. Nature is exceedingly wasteful. -- p83-86
Magnificent days of blue and crystal, when to be in the air made everything worth while, were over. Damp hangars, muddy roads, cold quarters, clouds and rain-these were to be our lot from now on.
One dreary grey morning I went up alone on patrol. The clouds were at two hundred feet, but they might break further east over the lines. I rose into the cloud-bank -- a featureless obscurity, a white dark, as you might say-and started climbing. A pilot flies by his horizon. He keeps his machine on an even keel, or indeed in any position, by reference to it. Take away the horizon and he doesn't know where he is. This is the reason for gyroscopic controls, false horizon indicators, and all the modern gadgets (to say nothing of beam wireless) which enable a man to fly blind, and a commercial pilot to bring his thirty-eight passengers on to Croydon aerodrome in a pea-soup fog without too much anxiety. But in 1916 a chap had an airspeed indicator and a lateral bubble (which was supposed to tell him if he was on an even keel) , and the rest was the luck of the game and his native "nous".
In a cloud there is no horizon, nothing above, below, in front, behind, but thick white mist. It's apt to make you panic after a while, and many a man has fallen out of the clouds in a spin through losing his head and, without knowing it, standing his machine on its ear. Usually low cloud-banks aren't so very deep, so if you go carefully and watch the controls closely you get up through them all right; but on this particular morning there seemed to be no top to them. I climbed and climbed, looking up all the time, hoping to see that thinning of the mist and the halo of the sun above which means you're almost through. But it wasn't until I reached two thousand feet that I saw the welcome sheen of gold overhead. It thinned. Mist wraiths drew back and showed blue. They curled away. I was out.
But what in heaven had happened to this cloud-bank? It wasn't level. It was tilted as steeply as the side of a house. The machine was all right-airspeed constant, bubble central-and yet here were the clouds defying all natural laws! I suppose it took me a second to realise that I was tilted, bubble or no bubble, that I had been flying for the best part of fifteen minutes at an angle of thirty degrees to the horizon-and had never noticed it! If I had tried to fly this way on purpose, it would have seemed impossible, at the best most unpleasant. The machine would have shuddered and slipped. I should have been in a dither after half a minute. If you'd told me anyone could fly like it quite happily for ten minutes, I should just have laughed. It shows what a little ignorance can do.
I put the machine level and gazed around in wonder. Here it was still summer. Below, life was dying back into the earth. Gold plumes fluttering from the poplars. The mournful voice of the October wind. But here! As far as the eye could reach, to the four horizons, a level plain of radiant whiteness, sparkling in the sun. The light seemed not to come from a single source, but to pervade and permeate every atom of air-a dazzling, perfect, empty basin of blue.
A hundred miles, north, south, east, west. Thirty thousand square miles of unbroken cloud-plains! No traveller in the desert, no pioneer to the poles, had ever seen such an expanse of sand or snow. Only the lonely threshers of the sky, hidden from the earth, had gazed on it. Only we who went up into the high places under the shadow of wings!
I sailed on for a time, alone in the wonderful skies, as happy as I have ever been or ever shall be, I suppose, in this life, looking lazily for some rift in the white floor; but there was none. It was complete, unbroken, absolute. I was about to turn west again when I saw, in the distance, a cloud floating above the floor, small, no bigger than a man's hand; but even as I looked, it seemed to grow. It swelled, budded, massed, and I realised I was watching the very birth of a cloud -- the cumulus cloud that chiefly makes the glory of the sky, the castles, battlements, cathedrals of the heavens. What laws had governed its birth at that moment, at that place, amid the long savannahs of the blue? Heaven, that bore it, knew. Still it was there, creating a growing loveliness out of nothing! A marriage of light and water, fostered by the sun, nourished by the sky!
I turned towards it, fascinated. It grew rapidly. Soon it was vast, towering, magnificent, its edges sharp, seemingly solid, though constantly swelling and changing. And it was alive with light. Radiant white, satin soft, and again gold, rose-tinted, shadowed and graded into blue and mauve shadows-an orient pearl in the oyster shell of heaven! And all the time I knew that I had but to come close enough for all the illusion to be gone, the solidity and beauty to dissolve, the edges to fray and dull, and that within it would be the same grey mist that you may meet on any moor in England.
Wisdom said: Keep distance and admire. Curiosity asked: How much closer without losing the illusion? I edged nearer. I was utterly alone in the sky, yet suddenly, against the wall of the cloud, I saw another machine. It was so close that instinctively; as an instantaneous reaction to the threat of collision, I yanked the stick and reeled away, my heart in my mouth. A second later, I looked round and laughed. There was nothing there! It was my own shadow I had seen, the silhouette of the machine on the white cheek of the cloud. I came back to observe the strange and rare phenomenon. There on the cloud was my shadow, dark, clean-cut; but more than the shadow, for around it was a bright halo of light, and outside that a perfect circular rainbow, and outside that again another rainbow, fainter, reversed.
From the ground the rainbow is an arch spanning the visible heaven. From the next hilltop, so it seems, one would be high enough to solve the riddle of where it ends. But here it was small, bright, compact, a perfect circle, and at the centre the shadow of the Parasol, like the stamped image on a golden coin.
I shut off, turned east, and came down. The white floor, several thousand feet below, rose up towards me, turned at last from a pavement of pearl to just a plain bank of fog. I plunged into it. I might be going back from paradise to purgatory; so grey and cold and comfortless it was. And as I sank through it, listening to the singing of the wires, I was thinking how some day men might no longer hug the earth, but dwell in heaven, draw power and susten/ance from the skies, whirl at their will among the stars, and only seek the ground as men go down to the dark mysteries of the seafloor, glad to return, sun-worshippers, up to the stainless heaven.
The melancholy landscape of stubble fields and bare trees appeared. I picked up a road, got my bearings, and swept off home at a hundred feet.
"Did you see anything?" said another pilot, strolling up to the machine.
"'Nothing. It's completely dud." -- p103-105
Pages from the Folio Society edition, 1998
