Perhaps we too are slowly approached in this exercise in gravitation. The density of aerial warfare? Grains of dust in a cathedral. We, grains of dust, are perhaps attracting to ourselves some dozens, it may be hundreds, of enemy grains of dust. And all those cinders rise as from a shaken rug slowly into the sky.

Take what easy, Major Alias? Looking straight down, all that I see is the bric-a-brac of another age exhibited under a pure crystal without tremor. I am leaning over the glass cases of a museum. But already the exhibit stands outlined against the light. Very far ahead lie Dunkerque and the sea. To left and right I see nothing. The sun has dropped too low, now, and I command the view of a vast glittering sheet.

“Dutertre! Can you see anything at all in this mess?”

“Straight down, yes.”

“Gunner! Any sign of the fighters?”

“No sign, sir.”

The fact is, I have absolutely no idea whether or not we are being pursued, and whether from the ground they can or cannot see us trailed by the collection of gossamer threads we sport.

Gossamer threads set me daydreaming again. An image comes into my mind which for the moment seems to me enchanting.

“... As inaccessible as a woman of exceeding beauty, we follow our destiny, drawing slowly behind us our train of frozen stars.”

“A little kick to port, Captain.”

There you have reality. But I go back to my shoddy poetry: “We bank, and a whole sky of suitors banks in our wake.”

Kick to port, indeed! Try it.

The woman of exceeding beauty has fumbled her bank.

Is it true that I was humming?

For Dutertre has spoken again. “Hum like that, Captain, and you’ll pass out.”

He has certainly killed my taste for humming.

“I’ve just about got all the photos I want, Captain. Another few minutes and we can make for Arras.”

We can make for Arras. Why, of course. Since we’re half way there, we might as well.

Phew! My throttles are frozen!

And I say to myself:

“This week, one crew out of three has got back. Therefore, there is great danger in this war. But if we are among those that get back, we shall have nothing to tell. I have had adventures—pioneering mail lines; being forced down among rebellious Arabs in the Sahara; flying the Andes. But war is not a true adventure. It is a mere ersatz. Where ties are established, where problems are set, where creation is stimulated—there you have adventure. But there is no adventure in heads-or-tails, in betting that the toss will come out life or death. War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.”

Perhaps I shall feel later that my sole veritable adventure in this war was that of my room in Orconte.

IX

Orconte is a village on the outskirts of Saint-Dizier where my Group was stationed during the bitterly cold winter of ’39. I was billeted in a clay-walled peasant house. The temperature would drop during the night low enough to freeze the water in my rustic crock, and the first thing I did in the morning was of course to light a fire. But to do that I had to get out of a bed in which I lay snug and warm and happy.

Nothing seemed to me more miraculous than that simple bed in that bare and freezing chamber. It was there that I revelled in the bliss of relaxation after the exhaustion of the day’s work.