He didn't think Why yet. He just thought What. He had never heard of a recess in war. But then, he knew so little about war; he realised now that he knew nothing about war. He would ask Brides-man, glancing about the room where they were already beginning to disperse, and in the first moment realising that Bridesman was not there, and in the next one that none of the flight commanders Monday was there: not only Bridesman, but Witt and Sibleigh too, which in Witt's case obviously meant that he still had C Flight out on the mid-morning job, and which-the fact that C Flight was still carrying on with the war-ratified the major's words; C Flight hadn't quit, and if he knew Bridesman (and after three weeks he certainly should) B hadn't either; glancing at his watch now: half after ten, thirty minutes yet before B would go up; he would have time to finish the letter to his mother which Bridesman had interrupted yesterday; he could even-since the war would officially begin for him in thirty minutes-write the other one, the succinct and restrained and modestly heroic one to be found among his gear afterward by whoever went through it and decided what should be sent back to his mother: thinking how the patrol went up at eleven and the remand would begin at twelve, which would leave him an hour-no, it would take them ten minutes to get to the lines, which would leave fifty minutes; if fifty minutes was long enough for him to at least make a start after Bishop's and McCud-den's and Mannock's records, it would be long enough for him to get shot down in too: already moving toward the door when he heard engines: a flight: taking off: then running up to the hangars, where he learned that it was not even B Flight, shouting at the sergeant, incredulous and amazed: 'Do you mean that all three flight commanders and all the depu-ties have gone out in one patrol?' and then heard the guns begin, not like any heavy firing he had ever heard before, but furious end simultaneous and vast in extent-a sound already in existence to the southeast before audibility began and still in existence to the northwest when audibility ceased. 'They're coming over!' he shouted. The French have betrayed us! They just go out of the way and let them through!'
'Yes, sir,' the flight sergeant said. 'Hadn't you better get along to the office? They may be wanting you.'
'Right,' he said, already running, back up the vacant aerodrome beneath the sky furious with the distant guns, into the office which was worse than empty: the corporal not only sitting as always behind the telephone, but looking at him across the dogeared copy of Punch which he had been looking at when he saw him first three weeks ago. Where's the major?' he cried.
'Down at Wing, sir,' the corporal said.
'Down at Wing?' he cried, incredulous, already running again: through the opposite door, into the mess, and saw the rest of the squadron's new replacements like himself all sitting quietly about as though the adjutant had not merely arrested them but was sit-ting guard over them at the table with his pipe and wound stripe and observer's O and single wing above the Mons Star ribbon, and the squadron chessboard and the folded sheet of last Sunday's Times chess problem laid out before him; and he (the child) shouting, 'Can't you hear them? Can't you?' so that he couldn't hear the adjutant at all for his own noise, until the adjutant began to shout too: 'Where have you been?'
'Hangars,' he said. 'I was to go on the patrol.'
'Didn't anyone tell you to report to me here?'
'Report?' he said. 'Flight Sergeant Conventicle-----No,' he said.
'You're-----'
'Levine,'
'Levine. You've been here three weeks. Not long enough to have learned that this squadron is run by people especially appointed and even qualified for it. In fact, when they gave you those badges, they gave you a book of rules to go with them, to prevent you needing ever to rack your brains like this. Perhaps you haven't yet had time to glance through it.'
'Yes,' he said. 'What do you want with me?'
'To sit down somewhere and be quiet. As far as this squadron is concerned, the war stopped at noon. There'll be no more flying here until further notice. As for those guns, they began at twelve hours. The major knew that beforehand. They will stop at fifteen hours. Now you know that in advance too-'
'Stop?' he said. 'Don't you see-'
'Sit down!' the adjutant said.
'-if we stop now, we are beat, have lost-----'
'Sit down?
He stopped then. Then he said: 'Am I under arrest?'
'Do you want to be?'
'Right,' he said. He sat down. It was twenty-two minutes past twelve hours; now it was not the Nissen walls which trembled, but the air they contained. Presently, or in time that is, it was thirteen hours, then fourteen, all that distant outside fury reduced now to a moiling diastole of motes where the sun slanted into the western windows; getting on for fifteen hours now and the squadron itself reduced to a handful of tyros who barely knew in which direction the front lay, under command of a man who had never been any-thing but a poor bloody observer to begin with and had even given that up now for a chessboard-the other new men who had-must have-brought out from England with them the same gratitude and pride and thirst and hope-Then he was on his feet, hearing the silence still falling like a millstone into a well; then they were all moving as one, through the door and outside into that top-less gape from which the walls and roof of distant gunfire had been ripped, snatched, as a cyclone rips the walls and roof from the rec-tangle of vacancy which a moment ago had been a hangar, leaving audibility with nothing now to lean against, outbursting into vac-uum as the eardrums crack with altitude, until at last even that shocking crash died away.
That seems to be it,' a voice said behind him.
'Seems to be what?' he said. 'It's not over! Didn't you hear what the major said? The Americans aren't quitting either! Do you think Monaghan' (Monaghan was an American, in B Flight too; although he had been out only ten weeks, he already had a score of three and a fraction) 'is quitting? And even if they do-' and stopped, finding them all watching him, soberly and quietly, as if he were a flight commander himself; one said: 'What do you think, Levine?'
'Me?' he said. 'About what?' Ask Collyer, he thought. He's run-ning the nursery now; bitterly too now: Ask Collyer-the pipe, the balding head, the plump bland face which at this moment was England's sole regent over this whole square half-mile of French dirt, custodian of her honor and pride, who three years ago had probably brought out to France (he, Collyer, according to squad-ron folklore, had been ridden down by a Uhlan with a lance inside the war's first weeks and turned flying observer and came out again and within a week of that managed somehow to live through a F. E. crash after his pilot was dead and since then, carrying the same single pip and-the legend said-the same cold pipe, had been a squadron adjutant) the same feeling, belief, hunger-whatever you want to call it-as intolerant and unappeasable as his own, and then lost it or put it aside as he had put the war itself forever away, secure and immune in his ground job where no thirst for victory nor tumescence of valor could trouble him more; thinking, Oh yes, ask Collyer, finishing the thought which the cessation of the guns had interrupted inside the mess: He has quit too. He gave up so long ago that he doesn't even remember now that he hasn't even lost anything.-I heard the death of Eng-land he said quietly to himself, then aloud: 'Think about what? That noise? Nothing. That's what it sounds like, doesn't it?'