And this clutter of accessories that you carry about like an itinerant pedlar! All this complication of oxygen tubes, heating equipment; these speaking tubes that form the “inter-com” running between the members of the crew. This mask through which I breathe. I am attached to the plane by a rubber tube as indispensable as an umbilical cord. The plane is plugged in to the circulation of my blood. Organs have been added to my being, and they seem to intervene between me and my heart. From one minute to the next I grow heavier, more cumbrous, harder to handle. I turn round all of a piece, and when I bend down to tighten my straps or pull at buckles that resist, all my joints creak aloud. My old fractures begin to hurt again.

“Hand me another helmet. I’ve told you twenty times that my own won’t do. It’s too tight.”

God knows why, but a man’s skull swells at high altitude. A helmet that fits perfectly on the ground becomes a vise pressing on the skull at thirty thousand feet.

“But this is another helmet, sir. I sent back your old one.”

“Huh!”

I cannot stop grousing, and I grouse without remorse. A lot of good it does! Not that it is important. This is the moment of timelessness. This is the crossing of the inner desert of anguish. There is no god here. There is no face to love. There is no France, no Europe, no civilization. There are particles, detritus, nothing more. I feel no shame at this moment in praying for a miracle that should change the course of this afternoon. The miracle, for instance, of a speaking tube out of order. Speaking tubes are always going out of order. Trashy stuff! A speaking tube out of order would preserve us from the holocaust.

Captain Vezin came in with a gloomy look. No pilot ever got off the ground without a dose of Captain Vezin’s gloom. His job was to report upon the position of the Germain air outposts. To tell us where they were. Vezin is my friend and I am very fond of him; but he is a bird of ill omen. I prefer not to meet him when I am about to take off.

“Looks bad, old boy,” said Vezin. “Very bad. Very bad indeed.”

And didn’t he pull a sheaf of papers out of his pocket, to impress me! Then, looking as me suspiciously, he said:

“How are you going out?”

“By the town of Albert.”

“I thought so.