Colonel Julian and Other Stories Read online

  He did not quite know what happened after that. The flame went out into darkness. It seemed never to have happened; there seemed never to have been a flame. He was afterwards told that for a long time he did not utter a sound; but he had a fanciful and private impression of talking the whole time. It was also quite real; an impression of repeating to himself a frenzied catechism; ‘I can see, I can see, I can see.’ And then: ‘I will see, I will see, I will see. God! I will see!’ Then it appeared that at last he did begin talking and did amazing things in the way of instructing Jackson, his observer, to fly the aircraft. He was reported as being nervously and consciously active over the whole seaward course, and that, among other details, he kept naming the stars. He had again the private and absolute conviction that all this was nonsense. He had never talked at all. He knew that he was not even very good at naming the stars. He was quite certain about these things. And yet it was quite certain also that Jackson had flown the aircraft home and could only have done so under his advice. As he struggled afterwards to get at the truth of the long darkness that had succeeded the catastrophic moment of white flame, in which he was living and yet also dead, he fell back on the simple defence against terror that was its own dissolution. It was just one of those things.

  There followed about nine months in hospitals. The Colonel, who was still staring at the boy and trying to get himself into a state when he could talk easily beyond what were always the first moments of embarrassment, knew all about that time. Sometimes the boy talked very well. Even then the Colonel got the impression that, as often as not, he did not talk to him. He lay flat on his back, perfectly naked, outstretched and very brown except for white patches on the inner flanks of his thighs, and simply talked upward to the sun. He talked quite rapidly, giving no other sign of his high-pitched nervousness except that he drummed his fingers restlessly on the lead of the balcony. It might have been, the Colonel thought, that he was sometimes very much afraid. In a laconic and careless sort of way he talked of the miracles they had done to him in hospital. The Colonel, simply by sheer repetition, got to know some part of the surgical language of them: things like scarlet mercurochrome, Tierch grafts, pre-anaesthetic injections and God knew what. He heard how those grafts had left the boy for some time looking like a young cuckoo, his face a mess of puffed sewing that had a foul baldness not yet touched by sun. He had heard of physio-therapy and occupational therapy, and how, at last, the boy had come out of it, less shocking to look at than he had feared, with the fierce light of living in him, and able to see.

  Then the miracle of it all had almost been lost. It appeared from the livid language of the boy, who could out-swear a regular army sergeant without effort, that there had been a fool of a psychiatrist who had made the suggestion that he was mentally unfit to fly. It had had a violently opposite effect. It instantly brought to the surface, in a high emotional temperature, all the symptoms of the disease from which the Colonel now knew the boy was suffering. For as the Colonel lay on the terrace day after day and talked to the boy, it seemed to him that the very great differences between war as he had fought it long ago in Northern Indian hills, and as the boy fought it over the fields of France, was not a difference of time, of latitude, of speed or of weapons, but something more simple and more amazing. The Colonel had gone into war as another man might go into business; respectably, steadfastly, following his father in a line of succession. For the boy it was all quite different. Flying was a disease.

  He did not know if the boy was aware of that. He had only recently become aware of it himself. You could, of course, suffer from a disease without being aware of it. It was quite certain that it was something not wholly conscious which had sent the boy into a frenzy of antagonism and scheming against all authority until at last authority had finally given way and let him fly once more.

  Thinking of this, and then letting it slip away from his mind, the Colonel once again spoke to the boy. What was now happening in France interested him greatly. This war of movement was so fast that he did not know if you could any longer talk of strategy as he had once been taught it. He longed to get a picture of it, fixed and clear, as the boy might have photographed it from the air.

  ‘Tell me about this Seine thrust,’ he said. ‘What do you think of it? Do you think it aims at the coast?’

  ‘I never really trouble what the Brown Jobs are doing,’ the boy said.

  The Colonel was silenced. It was not a very good morning. Once again he was up against some new term he did not understand.

  ‘Brown Jobs?’

  ‘Army.’

  ‘Oh!’ the Colonel said. ‘Oh!’ He understood now. Of course, apart from the slight contempt it was very apt, very typical.

  ‘Yes, but it’s a combined operation,’ he said. ‘You are all in it. You depend very much on each other.’

  ‘Oh! I know,’ the boy said: as if he did not know at all.

  The Colonel did not know what to say. The astonishing realization that the boy did not know what was happening on a general scale stupefied him. It seemed an incredible thing. It seemed to arise from a different sort of blindness, not physical, but from the blindness of this intense and narrow passion to fly. To the boy all horizons beyond these narrow limits of vision were closed. His life soared furiously and blindly between.

  ‘Without you,’ the Colonel said, ‘the Brown Jobs might never force the issue.’

  The boy slightly tilted his head, turning towards the Colonel a pair of black sun-glassy lenses, as if to say ‘Force the issue? What the bloody hell does that mean?’

  For a moment the Colonel felt that he did not know what the hell it meant himself. He lay quietly in his chair. Across the garden now the horse-mower was silent. There was no sound except the sea-sound of cedar branches gently lifting and falling on the summer wind. It seemed now to the Colonel that the battle-front, really half an hour’s flight to the south, was a million miles away.

  ‘There is no bloody issue except killing Huns,’ the boy said. ‘That’s all that matters.’ He looked straight up into the sun.

  A certain essence of individual cruelty in this remark quite shocked the Colonel. It startled him so that he lifted himself up in the chair and looked at the boy. In the hot sun the face had a pure and impersonal immobility. The savagery of the remark was quite natural. To the Colonel there seemed a certain absence of ethics in the whole of this careless and calculated attitude of the boy’s towards fighting. In his day, the Colonel’s, there had been in fighting some sort of—well, he supposed it to be a sort of ethical water-line. You kept above it. The people who sank below the water-line, who made public a private desire to kill the man on the opposite side, were not thought very much of. It was very much like a game, and all the wars in which he had played it were really, beside this one, quite small. They seemed very important then and were quite forgotten now. He supposed perhaps that that was finally the essence of it: the hugeness of the thing. The boy had in his hands, like the rest of his generation, a frightening and enormous power. It was perhaps the greatest power ever given into the hands of the individual in all time.

  ‘Wizard day,’ the boy said. As suddenly as he spoke he curved up his long legs and outstretched them again, in a slow convulsive movement of pleasure in the sun. ‘Bloody wizard.’ He took great breaths of the warm, noontide air and breathed them out again.

  The Colonel, startled out of his reminiscence, did not speak, and the boy went on, talking as if to himself:

  ‘Gosh, the trees,’ the boy said, ‘and the smell of the bloody hay and the lime trees and all that. After all those months of smelling hospital wards and ether and anaesthetics, Christ, it’s good. Did I ever tell you what it was like in Normandy? I mean in the D-minus days.’

  ‘No,’ the Colonel said. He had given up.

  ‘Not the orchards? You could see them all in blossom at night, in the full moon. Miles of them. You know how short the nights are in May. Never quite dark. You could see everything. Every puff of smoke
from a train, and the rivers, and the orchards in blossom. Bloody wonderful, Colonel, I tell you. You never saw anything so lovely as the sun coming up and the moon not set and the sky half pink with sunlight and half yellowy with moonlight, and all the colour on the French orchards. I tell you, Colonel, you never saw anything so wonderful.’

  So much for the passionate, impersonal cruelty of the boy, the Colonel thought. So much for the notion of calculated savagery. It now seemed quite monstrous beside the tenderness of that description of orchards in May. He could see that the boy felt it very deeply and he tried to remember if, so long ago, he too had been touched by anything like that, but he could remember only scarlet rhododendrons, in fantastic cascades, on a wild furlough trek above Darjeeling; how they fell bloodily into rocky spring valleys there and how impressed he had been and how for that reason he had planted them liberally in the garden here. But the glory of them was never quite the same. The scarlet wildness was never renewed. There was something hot and foreign and un-English about them, anyway; not like the orchards, that were so cool and cloudy, like the northern skies. It pleased him very much that the boy liked them. It seemed to make him quite human again.

  And to his dismay the boy got up. He stood quite naked, and took off his glasses and turned away from the sun. His eyes had the oddest appearance of not belonging to the rest of his body. The pale new tissue, not yet merged into the older skin of the face, seemed lividly dead. It seemed to have been grafted there from another person altogether. It aroused the instant and uneasy impression that the boy was two different people.

  ‘Must you?’ the Colonel said. ‘So soon?’

  ‘I’m as hungry as hell,’ the boy said. ‘I’ve got to get dressed and lunch is off at two.’

  ‘Well, nice of you to come up,’ the Colonel said. ‘I do so appreciate it.’

  ‘Can I send you up a can of beer, sir?’ the boy said.

  ‘No. No thanks. I don’t think so.’

  ‘A half-can? The orderly can bring it up.’

  ‘No, thank you. Thank you all the same.’ He did not want to offend the boy. The pilots were very kind to him sometimes like that, sending him up tobacco or chocolate, or a glass of beer. ‘Perhaps tomorrow. Perhaps we might have a drink together. I should like that.’

  ‘Good show,’ the boy said.

  ‘About this time?’ the Colonel said.

  ‘Yeh. I’ll get the orderly to bring the beer up.’

  ‘I’ll wait for you,’ the Colonel said.

  The boy tucked the towel round his loins and hopped over the hot lead of the terrace into the bedroom, calling back over his shoulder something about the Colonel having a sleep, and as if in obedience the Colonel smiled and closed his eyes against the brassy midday light, the only light in which, after many years in the East, he ever felt really warm.

  He lay there next day at about the same time, in much the same attitude, waiting for the boy. The strength of the grasses’ sweetness had faded a little overnight. He caught it only at odd moments, in brief renewed waves, on the seaward wind. But the branches of the cedars rose and fell with the same slow placidity as the day before, and beyond them, if he raised himself up on his fleshless knuckles, he could again see across brown cornfields to the blue-grey edge of sea.

  He waited for just over an hour before deciding to go down into the garden to see if he could find the boy. He was permitted to use the back-stairs, once the servants’ stairs, on which now there was always a loathsome smell of stale cooking. He did not like these stairs and he was glad to be out of them, past the back entrance and the heaps of boiler coke, into the garden and the sun.

  At eighty-three he walked very slowly, with a sort of deliberate majesty, keeping his head up more by habit than any effort, and it was some time before he could walk far enough across the lawns to find someone to ask about Pallister. Groups of young officers were playing croquet on the farthest lawn, and the knock of balls and the yelling of voices clapped together in the clear air.

  Under one of the cedars, in shadow that was almost black, an officer in battledress was lying on the grass with a book. He had Canada on his shoulder.

  ‘Excuse me,’ the Colonel said.

  ‘Oh, hullo, sir,’ the Canadian said. ‘How’ve you bin?’

  ‘I was looking for Mr. Pallister,’ the Colonel said. ‘We were to have a drink together. I thought you might have seen him somewhere.’

  ‘I guess he bought it,’ the Canadian said.

  The language that he did not understand left the Colonel without a reply.

  ‘Yeh!’ the Canadian said. ‘I guess he bought it. Over France last night.’

  Time Expired

  Miss burke, who was Irish, and at pains to explain that she did not like men, stood on the open airstrip watching the wounded being loaded into the dusty Dakota. Her sunburned face had the deep Irish upper lip; she had square shoulders, and in her khaki drill she did not look like a nurse. She looked rather like a man who had indecisively begun to let his hair grow long and then has become slightly self-conscious of it and tucked it under his cap.

  When the wind that churned the soft yellow dust of the airstrip into high smoky clouds came beating under the body of the Dakota it caught the edges of Miss Burke’s masculine short back hairs and blew into them sudden small dimples, as into the fur of a cat. The dust had everywhere the fineness of powdered sulphur. It settled like fine sprayed paint on the dark wings of the plane, on the fabric of the ambulance, and even the bear-brown blankets of the stretchers, whenever for a moment or two a wounded man was set down.

  Whenever a plane took off or landed out on the runway, dust rose up into the clear air with oppressive insistence in huge yellow smoky columns, and clashed there against the harder, yellower light of sun. It seemed to make even more oppressive the oppressive heat of the shadeless afternoon. Only Miss Burke was not oppressed by it. Miss Burke, who had been nearly three years a nurse on the Burma battlefield, was quite used to most things now.

  In about another five minutes all the stretchers were in the body of the plane, strung from the roof traces and ready for take-off, and the crew were pushing past them into the nose. The men on the stretchers did not seem—to Miss Burke—any different from the men on the stretchers of any other day. They were a series of rigid and nameless bodies covered by brown blankets: a couple of Indian boys, turned Chinese yellow by pain and shock, and the rest British boys, pale too, and rather impassive, staring stiffly upward at the dark-green roof of the fuselage. For some reason today’s casualties were mostly leg wounds, so that the men, set in plaster, had something of the look of bits of broken statuary. Nobody acutely bad. Nobody screaming, anyway.

  Miss Burke got into the stifling plane and sat down on the edge of the iron seat opposite the door. One of the ground boys came almost directly afterwards and shut the door, and in that moment all the dazzling dustiness of the afternoon was shut away. Miss Burke sat with her hands in her pockets, listening to first one and then the other of the engines being started, until both were roaring together. Then as the plane began slowly to move out, away from dispersal tents, to the open runway, she glanced impersonally up at the wounded, suspended like a double row of carcases in oblong hammocks. They were all quite quiet.

  As the plane turned into the runway and then began to move down it, in a moment or two very fast, Miss Burke hung on to the nearest strap. There were no belts in the Dakota, but she liked to hang on to the strap just in case. The runway seemed to bump a little, and it did not occur to her, until she suddenly looked up, that there might be, for men on those slightly swaying stretchers, a feeling of insecurity. Even then she did not move. If anything happened you were all helpless anyway.

  It was only when she saw an arm being slowly lifted up and down from the foremost stretcher that she realized something was wrong. The signal annoyed her a little. No sooner airborne than somebody, she thought, starts binding. They were hardly even airborne. That was men, if you like, all over. The plane lif
ted itself off the earth exactly at the moment that her own impatience lifted her mind, and in the same way: in a slow, unsurprising pull, as of something so often repeated that it had ceased to astonish her.

  She walked up the body of the plane, levelled out now, to where the hand was waving limply to beckon her. It was one of the leg cases: an English boy with his left leg entirely encased, like a piece of masonry. His face had once been very brown, but now it had turned, under shock, to the lustreless colour of the dust they had left behind. She saw at once, by trained instinct, that he was very tired.

  ‘Something wrong?’ She had trained herself to speak not loudly but visually, with exaggerated movement of her big Irish lips, so that now, at once, the boy was sure what she said. She had trained herself also to record answers, and those also visually, so as not to strain herself against the noise of the plane.

  ‘Are we up?’ the boy said.

  For crying out loud, Miss Burke thought, where in the name of God does he think we are? Only a man would ask it. She looked out of the window. They had climbed to four or five hundred feet, and down below, already, the tents of the airfield had begun to look like sunbaked seashells on a sandy lake between stunted fringes of palms. Beyond this, in all directions, low jungle was assuming a dark wavy relief, spreading outward in huge monotonous sections, unbroken except by the sulphury veins of tiny roads.

  She turned her head and nodded. She did not know if there was anything she could say. Idiotic to ask him if by any chance he thought they weren’t going to get up. Idiotic to discuss remote chances against the roar of two engines. She swallowed hard, and the noise of engines changed its note. Idiotic to talk to him, anyway.

  ‘How long shall we be?’ the boy said.