I had exerted myself like a man trying to pick up a grand piano. Flying thirty-three thousand feet in the air, I had struggled like a professional wrestler. The oxygen was being doled out to me. It was my business to use it up economically. I was paying for my orgy.

I began to inhale in swift repeated gasps. My heart beat faster and faster. It was like a faint tinkle. What good would it do to speak of it? If I went into a dive, they would know soon enough. Now I could see my instrument panel.... No, that wasn’t true. I couldn’t see it. Sitting there in my sweat, I was sad.

Life came back as gently as it had flowed out of me.

“Dutertre!”

“Captain?”

I should have liked to tell him what had happened.

“I ... I thought ... No.”

I gave it up. Words consume oxygen too fast. Already I was out of breath. I was very weak. A convalescent.

“You were about to say something, Captain?”

“No.... Nothing.”

“Quite sure, Captain? You puzzle me?”

I puzzle him. But I am alive.

“We are alive.”

“Well, yes. For the time being.”

For the time being. There was still Arras.

Thus for a minute or two I had the feeling that I should not pull through; and yet I had not observed in myself that poignant anxiety which, people say, turns the hair white in an instant. I began to think of Sagon, of what Sagon had said when, two months earlier, we had gone to see him only a few hours after he had been shot down behind our own lines. What had gone through his mind when the German fighters had surrounded him and nailed him to the stake.

VII

I see him exactly as he was, lying in the hospital bed. His knee had been hooked and broken by the tail-unit of the plane in the course of a parachute jump, but Sagon had not felt the shock. His face and hands were rather badly burnt, but all in all Sagon’s condition was not alarming. Slowly and in a matter of fact voice, as if reporting a bit of fatigue duty, he told us his story.

“I knew they had got me when I saw the air filled with tracer bullets round my plane. My instrument panel was shot to bits. Then I saw a puff of smoke forward. It wasn’t much, you know.