“Spinney, now, is it?” Gibbs snorts. “They should’ve given us a course on forestry before sending us out here.”
“What are you taking a shaving set with you for, Sassen?” Walpond-Skinner asks a pilot in the front row.
“Case I get shot down and taken prisoner, sir. Want to keep up appearances.”
“Why not just send your silk pyjamas over, and arrange for your mail to be forwarded? Go and put it back in your quarters! The only thing you’ll need with you if you get shot down and end up in one piece is a Verey gun, to torch the machine with.”
“I’ve got to pop over to the Floaters too,” Serge mumbles to Gibbs. “Our medicine box is low.”
Gibbs shrugs. He’s tried the cocaine-in-the-eyeballs trick, but doesn’t get the point of snorting it, and even less so of injecting stuff into one’s arm. Serge, for his part, can’t imagine flying without diacetylmorphine. He’s been making regular trips into Mirabel for months now, appointing himself, as far as the quartermaster there’s concerned, the squadron’s pharmaceutical liaison officer. Back on the boat, he stabs a phial into his wrist, then, catching sight of Cécile’s stocking, two round peep-holes snipped out of its fabric, picks that up and slips it over his head, brushing his face briefly with a honey-like genital scent. He pockets two more phials on his way out, then pauses for a last look at the river and the poplars, still and impassive against all the excitement. He can hear the engines catching on the field, the first planes moving through the long grass. The diacetylmorphine takes hold as he glides back up the path and over to his RE8, turning the machines’ manoeuvres as they taxi, pause and pirouette, escorting one another into position, into ballroom-dance steps, the roar of their engines into symphonies whose every chord is laden with insinuation…
Flying towards the lines, Serge has the same sensation as he had in massage sessions with Tania towards the end of his Kloděbrady sojourn. The whole front has a weekend feel. No round, white balloons are up; no blue and red lights flicker in the trenches. There’s no cordite smoke, no vapour blanket, nothing. It looks like the entire war effort has been stood down-or, rather, put into a casual mode in which formalities have been relaxed and, consequently, anything is possible. As he nears the English lines, he notices a change in the texture and colouration of the ground behind them. Its surface, previously pale and washed-out, has become darkened by spiky dots. They’re everywhere, crowded together like ants. In the relatively quiet air, Gibbs has no problem making himself heard as he shouts back to Serge:
“Men!”
They spill out of the trenches, flecking the circles and mandalas of the ruined roads and pathways. In some places Serge can make out subdivisions in their mass, semi-discrete clusters; in others the clusters are so large that they’ve run together and eclipsed the ground entirely. Unlike ants, though, they’re not moving: packed together with their bayoneted rifles pointing upwards, they’re sitting still as encrustations on a rock or hull, waiting for the signal to move. Serge reaches down between his legs and lowers his copper aerial. Testing the sigs, he leads Gibbs to above their interim receiving station, marked by a semi-circle of white cloth beside which, in place of Popham strips, a black-and-white Venetian blind opens and closes, winking Morse OKs at him. Then they turn back towards the lines and climb. Their route is slightly different to the normal one; the shift adds to the sense of strangeness brought about by the guns’ silence. The men in the German trenches seem to have noticed the changes too, to sense that something new is coming their way: they’re too nervous to send more than a token spattering of tracer fire towards him. The German kite balloons have picked up on the break with protocol as welclass="underline" all down the line they’re up as high as they can go. The one emerging from beneath his tail doesn’t bother to winch itself out of range, so intent is it on fixing its gaze on the dots massing on the far side-and Serge, caught in the same spell of anticipation, doesn’t bother to strafe it.
They find their position just back from the German lines at three-and-a-half thousand feet. Serge looks up and sees the squadron’s SE5s patrolling in formation high above them. He looks at his watch: twenty-eight minutes past eleven. He looks down: the whole battlefield is static, calm; only the planes move, serenely etching out their patterns. As Gibbs turns, then turns again, Serge runs his eye along the earth below, wondering in which part of it the moles have secreted their explosive droppings. For a while, he feels the presence, composited from blocks of air and tricks of the light, of that faceless diviner Baron Karl von Arnow: he’s hovering beside him, holding a dowser’s stick; and the wind buffeting the struts and wires is pronouncing his name-insistently, repeating it over and over: Are-NOW, Are-NOW, Are-NOW…
Then, as though summoned upwards by this incantation, the earth rises towards him. At first it looks like a set of welts bubbling up across its surface; the welts grow into large domes with smooth, convex roofs; the roofs, still rising upwards and expanding, start to crack, then break open completely; and through their ruptured crusts shoot long, straight jets of earth: huge, rushing geysers that look as though they’re being propelled upwards by nothing but their own force and volume, the dull brown matter defying both height and gravity through sheer self-will. As the closest geyser funnels up past the machine, its dizzy clods glitter in the air. Serge looks out horizontally, first north, then south: the whole German line is punctuated by these earth jets. They look like columns holding up the sky; it seems that if they crumbled it would fall. Their apex is much higher than his plane; for the first time, he has the impression that he’s flying not above the earth’s surface but below it-or, rather, within some kind of enclave contained inside it. A few seconds later, particles start raining down on the machine: small clumps and flecks, beating against the wings and sprinkling his cabin. The jets evaporate, and Serge looks down again to see two enormous holes in the ground beneath him. They gape like hollow eyes, the sockets of some giant who’s been lying beneath the landscape buried-perhaps for centuries, or perhaps even longer-and is only now, part by part, being disinterred.
“Shall I go down?” Gibbs shouts.
Serge doesn’t answer, hypnotised by the evacuated eyes.
“Shall I go down?” Gibbs shouts again.
Slowly, Serge moves his gaze to the east. The spiky dot-men on the ground have started moving. They’re swarming forwards, trickling through no-man’s-land’s rills and gullies. Every so often parts of their mass are thrown into the air by landmine explosions that, compared to the enormous ones that have just preceded them, seem no more substantial than the bursting of small spots. Shells have started falling too, machine guns chattering. Serge can pick out the starting-flare of 10th Battalion; he signals to Gibbs to fly towards it. As they make their first pass, the mirrors on the men’s backs flash; by the time they’ve turned around and made their second, there’s so much smoke around that none of the sky’s luminescence makes its way down to the mirrors and back up to Serge; by the third he can’t even see the men. He sounds his klaxon, but its noise is lost amidst gunfire. He can hear another machine’s klaxon sounding too, and presses his own again, to let it know he’s nearby; other planes apply their horns as well, like ships in fog. Serge taps Gibbs on the back and shouts: