Part 9

The brown smudge of the airdrome slid over the horizon. He blipped his motor and glided in carefully. No use straining that top wing--no telling what other parts had been hit. No use taking chances.

Hoyt was standing beside his machine with his glove off, staring at his finger nails. Phelps-Barrington was climbing out. Paterson taxied in between them. The man in the fourth machine just sat and stared over the rim of his cockpit. Phelps-Barrington walked slowly across to Hoyt and laid a hand on his shoulder. Hoyt shrugged and stuffed his bare hand into his coat pocket. Paterson sat with his goggles still on and his throat quite dry. The man in the fourth machine vaulted out suddenly, ripped off his helmet and goggles and hurled them to the ground. It was Trent.

He climbed out of his own machine and walked over toward Hoyt. Phelps-Barrington, who had a wild word for all occasions--Phelps-Barrington, who led the night trips to Amiens--was silent. When Paterson came up he shrugged and scowled ferociously.

“Is it you, Pat?” said Hoyt. “Thought it was Yardley.”

“’Struth!” said Phelps-Barrington. “Let’s go and have a drink.”

Paterson thrilled as the man slipped an arm through his. For one awful moment he had thought----

“Well,” Hoyt said, “those things will happen.” And he shrugged again.

“I saw dots to the southward,” said Paterson. “Maybe they’ll be in later.”

“No, little Rollo,” said Phelps-Barrington. “They won’t be in later or ever. I saw it with my own eyes--both in flames. I thought it was you, and until Trent landed, I thought he might be Mac. But I was wrong. Let’s shut up and have a drink!”

Then suddenly he knew, and his mind froze with the ghastliness of the thought. If he’d been quicker--if he’d turned and climbed above Yardley when he saw him lagging, with the smoke squirting from his hit motor--he could have saved him. If he had kept his eyes open behind, instead of dreaming, he might have saved MacClintock, too. In a daze, he stumbled after Phelps-Barrington. That’s why Trent had hurled his helmet to the ground and walked off. That’s why Hoyt had shrugged and said, “Those things will happen.” It was his fault--his--Paterson’s. He’d bolted and lost his head and fired blindly into the empty air. He hadn’t stuck to his man. He had let Yardley drop back alone to be murdered.

“Look here, P-B,” he muttered, “I’m not drinking.” He wanted to be alone--to think. So quick it had all been.

Phelps-Barrington grabbed his arm and pushed him stumbling into the mess shack. Trent was slumped down at the table with his glass before him, thumbing over a newspaper. He raised his head as they came in. “Two more of the same, steward--double.”

They sat down beside him and Phelps-Barrington reached for a section of the paper.

“It says here,” said Trent, “that Eva Fay didn’t commit suicide. Died of an overdose of hashish she took at a party in Maida Vale the night before.”

The steward brought the glasses. Trent raised his and looked at Paterson. “Good work, son.”

Paterson stared at him in amazement. Trent sipped his whisky and went on reading as if he had never stopped. Some time later, Paterson left them and went down to the flight office to find Hoyt. The thought of the morning still bothered him, in spite of Trent’s words, and he wanted to clear it up. Hoyt smiled as he came in. “Washed the taste out in Falernian?” he asked.

“Some. Look here, skipper--this morning--what about it?”

“What about it?”

“My part--I was fast asleep. I saw Yardley lagging, and I had a moment to cross above him, but I lost my head, I’m afraid, and went wild.”

The smile faded and Hoyt laid down his pencil. “Do you really think you could have saved him?”

“He was behind me already when I saw him lagging, just as you climbed and P-B dived.”

“Then you couldn’t have helped him, because Mac was done for when I saw him and climbed, and half a tick after I climbed, P-B saw Yardley burst into flames. There you are.”

“But if I’d kept my eyes back, instead of trusting to Mac?”

“Look here,” said Hoyt, “no man can keep his eyes on everything. Something always happens in the place he isn’t looking. Bear that in mind and forget this morning. You’ve seen a dog fight from the inside and lived. Take it easy. You’re not here to do everything. You’re here to stick to us. You might have run away. Remember that and be afraid of it. Remember if you get away by leaving a pal--he may live to come back. Then you’ll have to face him, and engine trouble is a poor excuse.

“Trouble with you youngsters is that you’ve been fed up on poobah. And the myth of the fearless air fighter. Put it out of your mind. There’s no such thing. Some are less afraid than others. Some are drunker--take your choice. Class dismissed.” Hoyt grinned. “Go get cleaned up. We’ll jog into Amiens for tiffin. Tender in half an hour. Tell Trent and P-B.”

They spent most of the afternoon at Charlie’s Bar with some of the men from the artillery observation squadron. For dinner they went to the Du Rhin and the glasses flowed red. Afterward, in another place, there was a fight, as usual, and chairs crashed like match sticks, until whistles sounded outside and the A. P. M.’s car, siren screaming, raced up the street. They poured out into the alleyway and ran, leaving the waiter praying in high, shrieking French.

Trent had a bottle with him. They rode all the way home singing and shouting to high heaven, forgetting that there were two empty chairs in the mess and that there might be more to-morrow.

“Take the cylinders out of my kidneys, Take the scutcheon pins out of my brain, Take the cam box from under my backbone And assemble the engine again!”

They were good fellows--Billy Hoyt, P-B, Pat, and Ray Trent. Have ’nother li’l’ drink.

They roared along like a Juggernaut, with the exhaust splitting the night air. Sometimes they were on the road and sometimes they were off. No one cared so long as they kept hurtling into the darkness.

Phelps-Barrington was fast asleep. Pat woke him up at the airdrome and tumbled him into the hut.

They stumbled over a kit bag in the doorway. P-B straightened up suddenly. “Good-bye, Mac, old lad, sleep tight.”

Trent kicked the bag out of the way. “Damned adjutant! Take P-B in with you, Pat. I’m bunking with the skipper. Might have the decency to take Mac’s kit over to squadron office and not leave it lying around the passage. ’Night.”

Paterson was quite sober. He tumbled P-B into bed and stood for a moment at the open window, staring out across the ground mist that billowed knee high in the faint night breeze. He rested his elbows on the sill and hid his face in his trembling hands. If he could only be like the others--casual--calloused. If he had less imagination--more sand--stamina--something. MacClintock had planned this night himself, at breakfast. Yardley had left a letter addressed and stamped on his window sill.

Paterson’s mind jumped miles to the eastward. He saw the two blackened engines lying somewhere in the bleak fields beyond, ploughed into the ground, with their mats of twisted wires coiled around them in a hideous trap.

Their families would get word to-morrow. “Missing,” it would read. And then later: “Previously reported missing, now reported killed in

## action.” And to-morrow--perhaps his own family. Why can’t it be quick?

There was a noise behind him. Someone fumbling at the door latch--Hoyt. “Had this bit left. Bottoms up! Quick!” He took the glass and drained it. The liquor bit into his veins and burned him. Hoyt set his own glass down on the washstand with a sharp click. “Get into bed now, you idiot. Good-night.”

Spiked drink. Hoyt was a good fellow--damned decent. Do anything for Hoyt. Never let Hoyt go. Like my brother--before the war. Good old Hoyt. And he sank suddenly into a dreamless fuddle of sleep.

* * * * *

The weeks crawled on slowly. Paterson felt like a man climbing a steep ladder. Each day was a rung behind him. Each new rung showed an infinite number still ahead, waiting for him to go on, luring him with their apparent safety, waiting for him to reach the one rotten rung that would do him in. Some day he would reach it, and it would crack under him, or his fingers would slip and hurtle him into the abyss under his charred engine.

Offensive patrols and escort for the artillery observation squadron filled their time, with sometimes a road strafe to vary the monotony. These he liked best, for some quaint reason--perhaps because there was less space to fall through. Sometimes there would be a battalion on those roads--a battalion to scatter and knock down like tin soldiers on a nursery floor. Quite impersonal. They were never men to Paterson. Like dolls they ran and like dolls they sprawled awkwardly where they fell.

P-B and Trent and Hoyt carried him through somehow. Mallory was back again, but Mallory never counted much with him. P-B and Trent and Hoyt were a bulwark. They meant safety. It was good to wake up at night and hear P-B snoring on the other cot, to know that Hoyt and Trent were asleep in the next cubicle. It was good to see them stamping to keep warm before the patrol took off in the half light of early morning. So different from one another and yet so alike underneath. Hoyt was nearer his kind than the two others. Tall and spindly like his brother, with a straight, thin nose that quivered slightly at the nostril when he was annoyed. Hoyt, who smiled and sanctioned the childish depravity of little P-B, but never quite met it with his own, although always seeming to, on the night trips to Amiens. Trent, glowering and quiet, with a keen hatred for everything political that he learned in the offices of the London and South Western before the war, when the army to him had meant young wastrels swanking the Guards’ livery in the boxes of theatres--wastrels who had died on the Charleroi Road three years before.

Suddenly, from one of his mother’s letters, he found that he had been in France almost three months. He stiffened with the thought and remembered what Hoyt had told him that day he had come: “I’ve been here three months. When I came, I came just as you did to-day--pucka green.” He knew then that all his hopes were false. He was the same to-day as he had been that first day. He would always be the same. The spot of fear would always be with him. Some day it would swell and choke him and his hands would function without his frozen brain. He should never have tried to fly. He should have gone into the infantry as his brother had. Too much imagination--too little something. In three months he had learned the ropes, that was all; how to fire and when to fire, where the Archie batteries were near Cambrai, how to ride a cloud and crawl into it--nothing more.

The weeks went on, creeping closer and closer to the twenty-first of March--the twenty-first of March--and with them the feeling crept into Paterson’s heart--a feeling that something frightful was to happen. Things had been quiet so long and casualties had been few. C Flight hadn’t been touched in weeks. He brooded over the thought and slept badly. He went to Amiens with P-B more frequently. If it was to be any of the three, he knew he wouldn’t be able to stand it. His bulwark would crumble and break and he would break with it. On the dawn patrols, those few minutes before they climbed into the cockpits and took off were agony: “This will be the day. It must be to-day. We can’t go on this way. Our luck will break.”

One day when they were escorting 119, four dots dived on them from behind and he knew suddenly what he would do. Stark, logically, the thing stood before him and beckoned through the wires of his centre section. If a shot hit his plane, he would go down. They were far over the lines, taking 110 on a bombing show. He would wabble down slowly, pushing his joy stick from side to side in a slow ellipse as if he were out of control. Then he would land and run his nose into the ground and be taken prisoner. The others would see him and swear that he’d been hit--and he wouldn’t do it until his machine had been hit. That for his own conscience’s sake and for the years he would have to live afterwards.

But A Flight, behind and far above, saw the dots and scattered them, and the chance was gone.

Then day by day he waited for another. He knew now that he would do it at the first opportunity. He slept better with the thought, and the minutes seemed shorter now while he waited at dawn for his bus to be run out. All the details were worked out in his mind. If any one of the three were close to him, he’d throw up his hands wildly before he started down. They’d see that and report it. Then when he landed he’d pull out the flare quick and burn his machine so that they would think he had crashed and caught fire. It was so easy!

He spent less time with P-B now. Somehow the old freedom was gone. Somehow Hoyt wasn’t the same to him either. He was working with three strangers he had never really known--three casual strangers he would leave shortly and never see again.

On the morning of the fourteenth of March the caller turned C Flight out suddenly, without warning, about an hour after P-B and Trent had returned from Amiens. A special signal had come in from wing headquarters. B Flight had the regular morning patrol, but there was to be an additional offensive patrol besides. A Flight had morning escort and the dusk patrol. That meant C for the special. Paterson could hear Hoyt swearing about it next door. P-B, across the room, uttered a mighty curse and rolled over. Paterson got him a bucket of cold water and doused his feverish head in it. Trent and Hoyt were still cursing pettishly in the next cubicle.

Sleep-stupid, the four of them stumbled into the mess for hard-boiled eggs and coffee. Mallory and the new man, Crowe, were already eating, white-faced and unshaven. They slumped down beside them in silence.

In silence, they trooped across the dark airdrome, buttoning their coats and fastening helmet straps against the cold wretchedness of the March wind. The machines were waiting for them in a ghostly line like staring wasps that had eaten the food of the gods and grown to gigantic size.

They climbed in and taxied out mechanically. B Flight had already left on the regular dawn patrol. They blipped their motors and roared away, leaving their echo and the sharp smell of castor oil behind on the empty ’drome.

Hoyt led them south to the crumpled ruins of Péronne and out to the line, climbing high to get the warmth of the sunlight that began to tint the clouds above them. They were going over to Le Cateau and beyond. Intelligence wanted pictures to confirm certain reports of new Hun shell dumps and battery concentration. The photographic planes were to go out and get them under escort as soon as there was enough light. As additional precaution, offensive patrols were to be kept up far over the enemy’s lines to insure the success of the pictures. They passed the sullen black stain that was Le Câtelet and turned to the eastward. The ground was already light and the camera busses would be starting.

Hoyt took the roof at eighteen thousand feet and skirted the cloud wisps, watching below for customers. Paterson watched P-B anxiously. He had been roaring drunk an hour before. Groggy and drunk still, probably. He closed in a trifle and climbed above him, but P-B waved him down and wiggled his fingers from the end of his nose.

He looked ahead and down at Trent. Trent had been drunk, too, but he was steady now, sawing wood above and slightly behind Hoyt.

Then, suddenly, beyond Trent and far below, he saw a Hun two-seater alone. The old stunt. Hoyt shifted and pulled up his nose to climb above it and wait. Trent followed him up. Somewhere above that two-seater, and a half mile behind, there would be a flight of Hun scouts skulking under the clouds, waiting to pounce on whoever dived for the two-seater. Hoyt knew it for a decoy. Paterson knew it. They would climb above the cloud edge, circle back, and catch the Hun scouts as they passed underneath.

Paterson trembled slightly. This was his chance at last. There’d be a long dive and a sure fight from behind, and in the mix-up he’d wabble down and out of the war via Lazaret VI in Cologne. He glanced around to see if Mallory was above him, and suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, he saw P-B shove his nose full down and throw himself into a straight dive for the decoy bus.

He gazed and shouted “No!” into the roar of his engine. P-B, in a nasty temper and half fuddled, didn’t smell the trick. There was one awful second, while Crowe closed up into P-B’s place and Hoyt banked to wait above, for the Hun scouts to pounce down on the Camel.

P-B fired, pulled up and dived again, far below them. The Hun two-seater banked sharply and came up and over in an Immelmann turn to get away. P-B caught it halfway over and a trickle of smoke swept out from its engine. Then in an instant Hoyt dived, with the rest of C Flight after him.

The next thing Paterson knew there were two Huns on his tail and a stream of tracer bullets pecking at his left wing. He pulled back on his stick and zoomed headlong up under Mallory. So close he was for a second that he could see the wheels turning slowly on Mallory’s undercarriage and almost count the spokes glinting in the sunlight where the inside canvas sheathing had been taken off.

Mallory pulled away from him in a quick climbing turn and the Huns passed underneath, banking right and left. Paterson picked the left-hand one, thundered down on him in a short dive, and let go a burst of ten shots into the pilot’s back. He saw the pilot’s head snap sideways and his gloved hands fly up from the controls. Then Mallory dived over him after the other one. He turned in a wild split-air and followed Mallory.

There were more Huns below him and to the left, with two of the C Flight Camels diving and bucking between them. He raced furiously into a long dive, picked the nearest, and opened fire again in short, hammering bursts. His Hun wabbled and started down awkwardly in long sweeps. He picked another, still farther below, and pushed his stick forward until the rush of air gagged him. Wildly he fired as he ploughed down on it, and the chatter of his guns stabbed through the roar of his engine. He yelled like a madman, shot under the Hun, pulled up sharply, and fired into its gray mud-streaked belly. There was a fan of scarlet flame and a shock that tossed him to one side. He stalled and whipped out into a spin. Far below him he could see the decoy two-seater trailing a long plume of reddish smoke and flopping, wings over, toward the floor.

Then, suddenly, he saw his chance to wabble down and get away. He ruddered out of the spin and ran his stick once through the slow ellipse he had planned. But somehow he had to force himself to do it. There wasn’t the relief he had expected. He looked back. Three C-Flight machines were still above him, fighting madly--P-B, Trent, and Hoyt. No--not this time. He pulled his stick back and climbed up. There were five Huns circling the Camels. It was a long shot, but he fired at the nearest and came up under the tail just as one of the Camels hurtled into a nose dive, twisted over, and snapped off both wings. He saw the pilot’s arms raised wildly in the cockpit and no more.

Blood streamed into his mouth. He had torn his lips with his teeth in the excitement. The warm salty tang mounted to his brain. His goggles were sweat-fogged. His fingers ached with their pressure on the joy stick, and his arm was numb to the elbow. In a spasm of blind hatred, he fired. Tracers raced across his top plane and struck with little smoke puffs that ripped the fabric into ribbons. His own bullets clawed at the Hun above him and fanged home.

He threw himself up and over in an Immelmann turn and came under the next, still firing. He let go his stick and jerked his Lewis gun down its sliding mount on his top plane. It fired twice and jammed. He yanked madly at the cocking lug, but it stuck halfway. He hurtled down again in another spin. The ground swept around in a quick arc that ended in clouds and more Hun busses. He caught at his thrashing joy stick. Again the ground flashed through his centre section struts in a brown smudge, with the blaze of the sun hanging to one end of it. Then there was a Camel above him and a Camel below him. He closed in on the one below and squinted at the markings. Hoyt. He looked up at the other Camel, but the numerals on the side of its fuselage were hidden with a torn flap of fabric. Together, the three turned westward and started back.

Presently, near the line, the bus above him wabbled and dipped its nose. He stared at it. It went into a long, even glide that grew slowly steeper as he watched. He looked down for Huns. There were none. The glide became a dive, the dive twisted into an aimless spin, like the flopping of a lazy swimmer turning over in shallow water. The spin flattened and the Camel whipped out upside down, stalled, snapped out again, and again spun downward in that ghastly slow way. Over and over, only to whip out, stall and spin again. It was miles below him now. Nothing to do. Fascinated, he watched it as he followed Hoyt’s tail. It was a mere dot now, flashing once or twice in the sun as it flopped over and over. Close to the ground now--closer. Then, suddenly, a tiny sheet of pink flame leaped up like the flash of a far beacon. That was all.