We stood there, hearing the far band, the far shouting. “You sure you feel all right?” Monaghan said.
“Thanks,” the German said. “I feel goot.”
“Come on, then,” Comyn said.
“You going to take him with you?” Bland said.
“Yes,” Monaghan said. “What of it?”
“Why not take him on to the A.P.M.? He’s sick.”
“Do you want me to bash your bloody face in?” Monaghan said.
“All right,” Bland said.
“Come on,” Comyn said. “What fool would rather fight than fush? All men are brothers, and all their wives are sisters. So come along, yez midnight fusileers.”
“Look here,” Bland said to the German, “do you want to go with them?” With his bandaged head, he and the subadar alone were visible, like two injured men among five spirits.
“Hold him up a minute,” Monaghan told Comyn. Monaghan approached Bland. He cursed Bland. “I like fighting,” he said, in that same monotone. “I even like being whipped.”
“Wait,” the German said. “Again I will not permit.” Monaghan halted, he and Bland not a foot apart. “I haf wife and son in Beyreuth,” the German said. He was speaking to me. He gave me the address, twice, carefully.
“I’ll write to her,” I said. “What shall I tell her?”
“Tell her it iss nothing. You will know.”
“Yes. I’ll tell her you are all right.”
“Tell her this life iss nothing.”
Comyn and Monaghan took his arms again, one on either side. They turned and went on, almost carrying him. Comyn looked back once. “Peace be with you,” he said.
“And with you, peace,” the subadar said. They went on. We watched them come into silhouette in the mouth of an alley where a light was. There was an arch there, and the faint cold pale light on the arch and on the walls so that it was like a gate and they entering the gate, holding the German up between them.
“What will they do with him?” Bland said. “Prop him in the corner and turn the light off? Or do French brothels have he-beds too?”
“Who the hell’s business is that?” I said.
The sound of the band came, thudding; it was cold. Each time my flesh jerked with alcohol and cold I believed that I could hear it rasp on the bones.
“Since seven years now I have been in this climate,” the subadar said. “But still I do not like the cold.” His voice was deep, quiet, like he might be six feet tall. It was like when they made him they said among themselves, “We’ll give him something to carry his message around with.” “Why? Who’ll listen to his message?” “He will. So we’ll give him something to hear it with.”
“Why dont you go back to India then?” Bland said.
“Ah,” the subadar said. “I am like him; I too will not be baron.”
“So you clear out and let foreigners who will treat the people like oxen or rabbits come in and take it.”
“By removing myself I undid in one day what it took two thousand years to do. Is not that something?”
We shook with the cold. Now the cold was the band, the shouting, murmuring with cold hands to the skeleton, not the ears.
“Well,” Bland said, “I suppose the English government is doing more to free your people than you could.”
The subadar touched Bland on the chest, lightly. “You are wise, my friend. Let England be glad that all Englishmen are not so wise.”
“So you will be an exile for the rest of your days, eh?”
The subadar jerked his short, thick arm toward the empty arch where Comyn and the German and Monaghan had disappeared. “Did you not hear what he said? This life is nothing.”
“You can think so,” Bland said. “But, by God, I’d hate to think that what I saved out of the last three years is nothing.”
“You saved a dead man,” the subadar said serenely. “You will see.”
“I saved my destiny,” Bland said. “You nor nobody else knows what that will be.”
“What is your destiny except to be dead? It is unfortunate that your generation had to be the one. It is unfortunate that for the better part of your days you will walk the earth a spirit. But that was your destiny.”
From far away came the shouting, on that sustained note, feminine and childlike all at once, and then the band again, brassy, thudding, like the voices, forlornly gay, hysteric, but most of all forlorn. The arch in the cold glow of the light yawned empty, profound, silent, like the gate to another city, another world.
Suddenly Sartoris left us. He walked steadily to the wall and leaned against it on his propped arms, vomiting.
“Hell,” Bland said. “I want a drink.” He turned to me. “Where’s your bottle?”
“It’s gone.”
“Gone where? You had two.”
“I haven’t got one now, though. Drink water.”
“Water?” he said. “Who the hell drinks water?”
Then the hot hard ball came into my stomach again, pleasant, unbearable, real; again that instant when you say Now. Now I can dump everything. “You will, you goddamn son,” I said.
Bland was not looking at me. “Twice,” he said in a quiet, detached tone.
“Twice in an hour. How’s that for high?” He turned and went toward the fountain. Sartoris came back, walking steadily erect. The band blent with the cold along the bones.
“What time is it?” I said.
Sartoris peered at his wrist. “Twelfth.”
“It’s later than midnight,” I said. “It must be.”
“I said it was the twelfth,” Sartoris said.
Bland was stooping at the fountain. There was a little light there. As we reached him he stood up, mopping at his face. The light was on his face and I thought for some time that he must have had his whole head under to be mopping that high up his face before I saw that he was crying. He stood there, mopping at his face, crying hard but quiet.
“My poor little wife,” he said. “My poor little wife.”
The end
All the Dead Pilots, William Faulkner
All the Dead Pilots
I
IN THE PICTURES, the snapshots hurriedly made, a little faded, a little dog-eared with the thirteen years, they swagger a little. Lean, hard, in their brass-and-leather martial harness, posed standing beside or leaning upon the esoteric shapes of wire and wood and canvas in which they flew without parachutes, they too have an esoteric look; a look not exactly human, like that of some dim and threatful apotheosis of the race seen for an instant in the glare of a thunderclap and then forever gone.
Because they are dead, all the old pilots, dead on the eleventh of November, 1918. When you see modern photographs of them, the recent pictures made beside the recent shapes of steel and canvas with the new cowlings and engines and slotted wings, they look a little outlandish: the lean young men who once swaggered.
They look lost, baffled. In this saxophone age of flying they look as out of place as, a little thick about the waist, in the sober business suits of thirty and thirty-five and perhaps more than that, they would look among the saxophones and miniature brass bowlers of a night club orchestra.
Because they are dead too, who had learned to respect that whose respect in turn their hardness had commanded before there were welded center sections and parachutes and ships that would not spin.
That’s why they watch the saxophone girls and boys with slipstream-proof lipstick and aeronautical flasks piling up the saxophone crates in private driveways and on golf greens, with the quick sympathy and the bafflement too. “My gad,” one of them — ack emma, warrant officer pilot, captain and M.C. in turn — said to me once; “if you can treat a crate that way, why do you want to fly at all?”
But they are all dead now. They are thick men now, a little thick about the waist from sitting behind desks, and maybe not so good at it, with wives and children in suburban homes almost paid out, with gardens in which they putter in the long evenings after the 5:15 is in, and perhaps not so good at that either: the hard, lean men who swaggered hard and drank hard because they had found that being dead was not as quiet as they had heard it would be.
That’s why this story is composite: a series of brief glares in which, instantaneous and without depth or perspective, there stood into sight the portent and the threat of what the race could bear and become, in an instant between dark and dark.
II
In 1918 I was at Wing Headquarters, trying to get used to a mechanical leg, where, among other things, I had the censoring of mail from all squadrons in the Wing. The job itself wasn’t bad, since it gave me spare time to experiment with a synchronized camera on which I was working. But the opening and reading of the letters, the scrawled, brief pages of transparent and honorable lies to mothers and sweethearts, in the script and spelling of schoolboys.
But a war is such a big thing, and it takes so long. I suppose they who run them (I dont mean the staffs, but whoever or whatever it is that controls events) do get bored now and then. And it’s when you get bored that you turn petty, play horse.
So now and then I would go up to a Camel squadron behind Amiens and talk with the gunnery sergeant about the synchronization of the machine guns. This was Spoomer’s squadron. His uncle was the corps commander, the K.G., and so Spoomer, with his Guards’ Captaincy, had also got in turn
