Fair Stood the Wind for France Read online

  Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Copyright

  FAIR STOOD THE WIND FOR FRANCE

  HERBERT ERNEST BATES (1905-1974) worked as a journalist and clerk on a local newspaper before publishing his first book, The Two Sisters. His most famous work of fiction is the bestselling Fair Stood the Wind for France (1944). Other well-known novels include Purple Plain (1947), Jacaranda Tree (1949), Scarlet Sword (1950) and Lave for Lydia (1952). The Darling Buds of May, the first of the popular Larkin family novels, was followed by A Breath of French Air (1959), When the Green Woods Laugh (1960) Oh, To Be in England! (1963) and A Little of What You Fancy (1970). His last works included the novel The Triple Echo (1971) and a collection of short stories, The Song of the Wren (1972).

  H. E. BATES

  Fair Stood the Wind for France

  Fair stood the wind for France

  When we our sails advance,

  Nor now to prove our chance

  Longer will tarry.

  Michael Drayton, 1563–1631

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  CHAPTER 1

  SOMETIMES the Alps lying below in the moonlight had the appearance of crisp folds of crumpled cloth. The glacial valleys were alternately shadowy and white as starch in the blank glare of the full moon; and then in the distances, in all directions, as far as it was possible to see, the high snow peaks were fluid and glistening as crests of misty water. Somewhere below, in peacetime, at Domo d’ossola, Franklin remembered he had once waited for a train for England.

  He held the mouthpiece of the intercomm. to his mouth, dry now after all the hours of flying across France, across the Alps. and into Italy and called his crew.

  ‘All set for France,’ he said. ‘Any complaints?’

  ‘Home is where I long to be,’ the sergeant rear-gunner said, ‘before I bust with boredom. What year is it?’

  ‘We’re Hannibal crossing the Alps,’ Sandy said. ‘The year is 218 B.C.’

  ‘It could be,’ Godwin said. ‘It’s all right for Connie. He just sits and plays patience.’

  ‘Patience hell,’ O’Connor said. ‘I’m dying of excitement now.’

  Franklin listened rather dully, his mind flat with strain, to the talk of the crew. It was August and the papers were beginning to use once again, with slight agitation, the word offensive. It did not mean very much to him. All through the winter the offensive had been mounted against Germany and had gone on, with some breaks in the late winter because of weather, into the third summer of the war. The New Year had come in again, as it had done the previous year and the year before that, with snow, and the spring had followed with bitter dry winds in May. There had been much east wind and sometimes that summer, with things going wrong again in Egypt and the summer seeming as if it would never come, people everywhere had seemed ill-tempered. Now with what the newspapers called the rising tide of war he could feel in himself, delayed and arid, his own impatience at the war. If he kept flying until October he would have been actively operational, with the same crew with the exception of Sanders, the wireless operator who had joined them in late spring, a whole year. He would have completed the first three hundred hours. From the first trips over Bremen, where he wore his belt so tight that it was like a warm knife laid curved and sharp over the sour cushion of his stomach, to the new long trips to Italy that had now begun in the late summer, it did not seem as if he had been flying a very long time. But the trips themselves, immensely long over the dull terrain of France, spectacular over the Alps, not yet violent over Italy, now began to seem longer in themselves than all his previous hours together. On the earlier trips he had learned very quickly the habit of flying relaxed and of fore-shortening the focus of his mind: so that he never looked forward beyond the next moment of darkness. He learned never to anticipate the flak, the searchlights, the exciting terror of the target, the long journey home. In this way the trips had never seemed long; the hell had been broken up into endurable fragments. Now he had begun to be cautiously aware of being tired.

  He was aware, too, that below him the Alps were receding very fast. Folded snow distances that had seemed infinite were already broken at the northern edges by the darker shadows of lower mountains, below the snow-line, as a clear sky is darkly broken in the distance by storm. He was glad of the change. These mountains began to take on, as the aircraft flew fast towards them, the crusty appearance of old bark, grey and fissured under the moon. He fancied he saw beyond them, the light was so strong and white and clear, the beginnings of the French plain. As he stared at the changes on the forward horizon, feeling for them with his eyes, he fought away with the edges of his mind the beginnings of tiredness. In a few moments the two things became one. His eyes and his mind were flickering mentally against the distances of fatigue as they groped physically for the new horizons beyond the last of the mountains.

  He shook himself out of a momentary doze and began to think of the crew again. They were silent now; he did not care for talking. He took very seriously the business of flying four other people over long hostile distances. In a year his affection for the four men had stiffened rather than grown. He measured it now not so much by what they were, but by his fears of whatever changes the absence of one of them might bring. All four were sergeants. None of them ever called him ‘sir’ now, and he never thought of any differences, service or social, between himself and them. In flying jackets the distinctions of the ground disappeared. From the beginning he had felt also, being the only officer, that it must be for him to go over to them, rather than that they, four of them and equal, should come over to him. To be accepted by the sergeants, to feel their unified confidence in him growing and opening wide at last to acceptance, was a great thing. It had given him something higher than fear; the firm knowledge, never expressed, that if anything should happen they would be together, for each other and of each other, in whatever sort of end there might be.

  The mountains of the distance had now become the mountains, huge and dark blue and wrinkled, of the country immediately below. The port wing of the Wellington seemed to mow across them like the black and slightly shining blade of an enormous scythe. As it cut over them and they were gone, their place was taken smoothly by the inward and backward flow of earth that seemed to have no more life, from that height and in the dead glare of the moon, than a relief map on a table. As Franklin looked at it he felt boredom once more fight through the edges of his tiredness, and he looked at his watch, surprised to find it earlier than he had thought. The time was ten minutes to two.

  ‘My watch must be wrong,’ he said into the intercomm. ‘What time do you make it?’

  One by one the four sergeants told him the time. Sandy counted the seconds for him, coming up to the minute. ‘Five, six, seven, eight, nine,’ and Franklin automatically turned the hands of his watch, making an alteration of less than three seconds. The time by all watches was ten to two. He thanked them and heard Taylor, in the rear turret, say that he could still see the Alps and that they still looked very wonderful from there. The moon was going down a little now, and the grea
t glare that had lain over the snow-peaks had already diminished and was touched with amber. In this weak and more beautiful light the distances northward became shorter. France seemed for some time longer a country of placid yellow patterns smoothed out of sight by both wings of the aircraft, and then there were more mountains on the port side, not very high but sharp with abrupt shadow where the lowering angle of the moon struck them. He did not yet know the Italian trip as he knew the trips to Bremen and Cologne, and he did not know which mountains they might be. He remembered them vaguely from an earlier trip, ten days before, and he calculated by them that he was well into France. He calculated he might be home by four.

  The mountains had already slipped away and the boredom of new stretches of placid French country to the north was already eating into his mind again, making him slightly sleepy, when the trouble in the port engine began. It was as if the engine ejected something violently. It seemed to lose suddenly part of its weight. The whole aircraft skewed violently to port and took a sideways and downward slip. The level skimming of the wings that had remained constant now for so long was broken in a second. The violence of the dive took him by surprise and he had lost about five hundred feet before his reactions became clear again and he began to take any action. His own confusion, together with the confused shouts of the crew over the intercomm. did not last more than a second or two. Shock cleared his mind of fright, leaving it wonderfully awake, so that all the possible reasons for everything drove brightly and swiftly through it. In this moment of alert realization, a second before his hands and feet began to do the instinctive things, he felt the whole aircraft pull up, give a sort of gigantic double shudder and flatten out again. This in itself was over so suddenly that he felt for one second longer that they might, after all, have hit nothing but an air-pocket and that all was well. Then he felt rather than heard, and instinctively rather than consciously, the change in depth of the sound of the engines. It seemed suddenly to have become shallow.

  ‘Christ, Frankie,’ O’Connor said. ‘What happened? What the hell happened?’

  For a second or two they were all talking together. They were excited by shock. He did not listen. He was listening only to the sound of the engines: in reality, as he now knew quite well, to the sound of one engine. He knew quite well that the port had gone

  ‘God, what was it?’ Taylor said. ‘I felt like something in a catapult.’

  Franklin did not answer. The reasons for it all, the reasons that had raced clearly through his mind, now came back in reverse order, more slowly and more clearly and more forcibly. He felt his hands sweating slightly on the stick. He felt one part of him struggling to accept the easy reasons, the other rejecting them. He tried to reason that it could be a short, that it couldn’t be overheating, that it couldn’t be the delayed result of flak, since the Italian stuff had been too light to touch them. He tried to reason that it could be just one of those things, inexplicable and apparently causeless, that may suddenly affect an engine anywhere, and then finally his fears and reasons were abruptly crystallized by the voice of Sandy.

  ‘You could get that same effect, skip,’ he said, ‘by breaking an air-screw.’

  Franklin was silent for a few moments longer. He looked in those moments at the altimeter and his speed. The air speed was already down and was falling in irregular jerks on the dial. The altimeter showed a little less than sixteen thousand. It fell as he looked at it. In those few moments the situation cleared itself finally of doubt. They had plenty of height and he was not afraid. They would lose more height, but it would, he hoped, be smooth and over a period of time. He rejected quite calmly first, the thought of getting home, and then, directly afterwards, the thought of baling out. In those few moments, making his decisions, he felt very alone and finally assured. If he had any other emotion of comparable strength it was a moment of anger: anger that a cause beyond his control and perhaps beyond his explanation should affect and change his life with violence and perhaps catastrophe.

  The altimeter was down below fifteen thousand when he spoke again to the crew.

  ‘It is the air-screw,’ he said.

  ‘Well, for Christ’s sake,’ O’Connor said. ‘Just like that.’

  ‘Just like that,’ he said, ‘and we won’t make it.’

  They did not answer now. He felt the moment of silence deeply. It was their confidence and did not need to be spoken. He had forgotten utterly now about the Alps, the moonlight, the boredom, and even about the air-screw. A few moments of the immediate future were all that mattered. They were a division, a gap, in the lives of all of them, and it was his business to take them through it. They were waiting for what he had to say.

  ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I’m going to land within the next five or ten minutes. Roughly where are we, Sandy?’

  ‘About west-north-west of the Vosges. Away south of Paris.’

  ‘Occupied or Unoccupied?’

  ‘Unless you turn back it’ll be Occupied. I’m not sure of the line.’

  ‘What’s it matter?’ O’Connor said. ‘They’re all crooks.’

  ‘You’re going to find that out,’ Franklin said.

  He went on slowly and calmly telling them what to do, watching his height and his speed at the same time. The situation in these few minutes, as he reminded the crew of maps and emergency rations and the details of landing, did not once seem desperate.

  ‘Don’t do anything cock-eyed,’ he said. ‘If anything happens to anybody do your best for him. Take away identification marks. Bust the kite up as much as you can and then start walking. Go south-west. Walk at night and go through the towns about dusk. Remember what you’ve been told. O.K.?’

  ‘O.K.’ They answered him one by one. ‘O.K.’

  ‘O.K.,’ he said. ‘Pack your bags and take up stations for landing.’

  The face of the land in the moonlight began to show clear patterns of gold and shadow and white straight intersections of road as he put the nose of the Wellington down. The land, perhaps because of the lower angle of the deeper moon, seemed everywhere of a possible and easy flatness. Coming lower, he saw here and there the white and black cube of a house in the moon. The transitory landscape stopped being dead. It became real and alive with fields and roads and houses, and here and there, as he came lower still, he could see in the whiter fields the rows of shocked corn.

  He came in to land with the moon low and heavily gold on his right hand. His speed was lower than he would have liked, but the pale yellow landscape seemed to come up towards him at a furious slant. The tail did not seem to go down well and he pressed with all the strength of his legs on the rudder bar until he knew at last, as the trees began to tear past underneath him like fragments of wreckage torn up by a tornado, that it was successfully down. Then he saw before him the clear spaces of earth, almost beautifully rectangular and free of obstruction and smooth as asphalt, that he had all this time been seeking out. Until that moment all that had been happening and had happened was clear and right and uncomplicated. The light earth came up to him very fast, and after the first bumping moments of contact became, as it were, secured to the aircraft. Then a second later he knew that something was wrong. The ground was too soft and the moon for a few seconds jolted wildly about the sky. The Wellington did a ground loop, about three-quarters circle, and Franklin could not hold it. He was aware of being thrown violently forward and of his sickness knotting in his stomach and then rising and bursting and breaking acidly, with the smell of fuel and oil, in his mouth. He was aware of all the sound of the world smashing forward towards him, exploding his brain, and of his arms striking violently upward, free of the controls. For a moment he seemed to blackout entirely and then the moon, hurling towards him, full force, smashed itself against his eyes and woke him brutally to a moment of crazy terror. In that moment he put up his hands. He felt his left arm strike something sharp, with sickening force, and then the moon break again in his face with the bloody and glassy splinters in a moment beyond which there
was no remembering.

  CHAPTER 2

  WHEN he opened his eyes the moon was full on his face. He could smell his own sickness on his flying jacket and he could feel, in a way that pained and troubled him, the beat of aircraft engines pumping and thundering in his left arm. This arm was also wet and hot. The terrible thump of engines beating down the arteries seemed as if they must finally sever the arm from the shoulder.

  ‘It’s O.K., Frankie,’ Sandy said.

  He could not speak in answer. He knew that he was lying on his back. He could see Sandy’s head moving across the line of the moon. He wondered what had happened to the rest.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Sandy said. ‘Everybody is all right.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Everything was lovely, except the ground was too soft. We just looped and wrapped up. That’s all. We’re in a sort of marsh.’

  The thump of engines pulling the socket of his arm with sickening pain began to increase as his consciousness came back. There was no blood in his lips and his face felt intensely cold and drawn.

  ‘Where are the rest?’

  ‘They’re in the kite,’ Sandy said. ‘Collecting things. What are we going to do? Burn it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

  ‘The whole neighbourhood will have seen us come down. If there is a neighbourhood. Perhaps it’s luck we came down in this marsh. Are you all right?’

  ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘I don’t know.’

  More and more the pain of his arm was sucking away his strength. He felt himself dragged down, helpless, through a cold wet descent of darkness. With his free arm he dug his nails into the earth and made a great effort and kept himself, cold and weak, on the edge of consciousness.

  ‘Jesus, it’s my arm.’

  ‘I’ll get your jacket off. Roll over a bit,’ Sandy said, ‘can you?’

  He rolled over on his right side and Sandy zipped the Irwin jacket open. He pulled out his right arm and then Sandy took the sleeve of his left arm and pulled it gently down. The pain of this slow movement crawled up his arm, beating against the downward flow of blood, until it reached the socket. The sleeve came slowly off and with it, as it came free, all the returning pain and blood and sickness of his arm. He felt for a moment so weak that he could not even look at the moon. He looked down at his arm instead. And in that moment, as his jacket came free, he saw the spurt of his own blood spewed upward from the vein, vicious and thick, pumped irregularly from the wound.