“The dog will like that, anyway,” I said.
“The dog?” Sartoris said.
“The food will be better there,” I said.
“Oh,” Sartoris said. They had reduced him to second lieutenant, for dereliction of duty by entering a forbidden zone with government property and leaving it unguarded, and he had been transferred to another squadron, to the one which even the B.E. people called the Laundry.
This was the day before he left. He had no front teeth at all now, and he apologized for the way he talked, who had never really talked with an intact mouth. “The joke is,” he said, “it’s another Camel squadron. I have to laugh.”
“Laugh?” I said.
“Oh, I can ride them. I can sit there with the gun out and keep the wings level now and then. But I can’t fly Camels. You have to land a Camel by setting the air valve and flying it into the ground. Then you count ten, and if you have not crashed, you level off. And if you can get up and walk away, you have made a good landing. And if they can use the crate again, you are an ace. But that’s not the joke.”
“What’s not?”
“The Camels. The joke is, this is a night-flying squadron. I suppose they are all in town and they dont get back until after dark to fly them. They’re sending me to a night-flying squadron. That’s why I have to laugh.”
“I would laugh,” I said. “Isn’t there something you can do about it?”
“Sure. Just keep that air valve set right and not crash. Not wash out and have those wing flares explode. I’ve got that beat. I’ll just stay up all night, pop the flares and sit down after sunrise. That’s why I have to laugh, see. I cant fly Camels in the daytime, even. And they dont know it.”
“Well, anyway, you did better than you promised,” I said. “You have run him off the continent of Europe.”
“Yes,” he said. “I sure have to laugh. He’s got to go back to England, where all the men are gone. All those women, and not a man between fourteen and eighty to help him. I have to laugh.”
VII
When July came, I was still in the Wing office, still trying to get used to my mechanical leg by sitting at a table equipped with a paper cutter, a pot of glue and one of red ink, and laden with the meager, thin, here soiled and here clean envelopes that came down in periodical batches — envelopes addressed to cities and hamlets and sometimes less than hamlets, about England — when one day I came upon two addressed to the same person in America: a letter and a parcel. I took the letter first. It had neither location nor date:
Dear Aunt Jenny
Yes I got the socks Elnora knitted. They fit all right because I gave them to my batman he said they fit all right. Yes I like it here better than where I was these are good guys here except these damn Camels. I am all right about going to church we dont always have church.
Sometimes they have it for the ak emmas because I reckon a ak emma needs it but usually I am pretty busy Sunday but I go enough I reckon. Tell Elnora much oblige for the socks they fit all right but maybe you better not tell her I gave them away. Tell Isom and the other niggers hello and Grandfather tell him I got the money all right but war is expensive as hell.
Johnny.
But then, the Malbroucks dont make the wars, anyway. I suppose it takes too many words to make a war. Maybe that’s why.
The package was addressed like the letter, to Mrs Virginia Sartoris, Jefferson, Mississippi, U.S.A., and I thought, What in the world would it ever occur to him to send to her? I could not imagine him choosing a gift for a woman in a foreign country; choosing one of those trifles which some men can choose with a kind of infallible tact.
His would be, if he thought to send anything at all, a section of crank shaft or maybe a handful of wrist pins salvaged from a Hun crash. So I opened the package. Then I sat there, looking at the contents.
It contained an addressed envelope, a few dog-eared papers, a wrist watch whose strap was stiff with some dark dried liquid, a pair of goggles without any glass in one lens, a silver belt buckle with a monogram. That was all.
So I didn’t need to read the letter. I didn’t have to look at the contents of the package, but I wanted to. I didn’t want to read the letter, but I had to.
— Squadron, R.A.F., France.
5th July, 1918.
Dear Madam,
I have to tell you that your son was killed on yesterday morning. He was shot down while in pursuit of duty over the enemy lines. Not due to carelessness or lack of skill. He was a good man. The E.A. outnumbered your son and had more height and speed which is our misfortune but no fault of the Government which would give us better machines if they had them which is no satisfaction to you.
Another of ours, Mr R. Kyerling 1000 feet below could not get up there since your son spent much time in the hangar and had a new engine in his machine last week. Your son took fire in ten seconds Mr Kyerling said and jumped from your son’s machine since he was side slipping safely until the E.A. shot away his stabiliser and controls and he began to spin.
I am very sad to send you these sad tidings though it may be a comfort to you that he was buried by a minister. His other effects sent you later.
I am, madam, and etc.
C. Kaye Major
He was buried in the cemetary just north of Saint Vaast since we hope it will not be shelled again since we hope it will be over soon by our padre since there were just two Camels and seven E.A. and so it was on our side by that time.
C. K. Mjr.
The other papers were letters, from his great-aunt, not many and not long. I dont know why he had kept them. But he had. Maybe he just forgot them, like he had the bill fromthe London tailor he had found in his overalls in Amiens that day in the spring.
. . . let those foreign women alone. I lived through a war myself and I know how women act in war, even with Yankees. And a good-for-nothing hellion like you . . .
And this:
. . . we think it’s about time you came home. Your grandfather is getting old, and it don’t look like they will ever get done fighting over there. So you come on home. The Yankees are in it now. Let them fight if they want to. It’s their war. It’s not ours.
And that’s all. That’s it. The courage, the recklessness, call it what you will, is the flash, the instant of sublimation; then flick! the old darkness again. That’s why. It’s too strong for steady diet. And if it were a steady diet, it would not be a flash, a glare.
And so, being momentary, it can be preserved and prolonged only on paper: a picture, a few written words that any match, a minute and harmless flame that any child can engender, can obliterate in an instant. A one-inch sliver of sulphur-tipped wood is longer than memory or grief; a flame no larger than a sixpence is fiercer than courage or despair.
The End
Crevasse, William Faulkner
Crevasse
THE PARTY GOES on, skirting the edge of the barrage weaving down into shell craters old and new, crawling out again. Two men half drag, half carry between them a third, while two others carry the three rifles. The third man’s head is bound in a bloody rag; he stumbles his aimless legs along, his head lolling, sweat channeling slowly down his mud-crusted face.
The barrage stretches on and on across the plain, distant, impenetrable. Occasionally a small wind comes up from nowhere and thins the dun smoke momentarily upon clumps of bitten poplars. The party enters and crosses a field which a month ago was sown to wheat and where yet wheatspears thrust and cling stubbornly in the churned soil, among scraps of metal and seething hunks of cloth.
It crosses the field and comes to a canal bordered with tree stumps sheared roughly at a symmetrical five-foot level. The men flop and drink of the contaminated water and fill their water bottles. The two bearers let the wounded man slip to earth; he hangs lax on the canal bank with both arms in the water and his head too, had not the others held him up.
One of them raises water in his helmet, but the wounded man cannot swallow. So they set him upright and the other holds the helmet brim to his lips and refills the helmet and pours the water on the wounded man’s head, sopping the bandage. Then he takes a filthy rag from his pocket and dries the wounded man’s face with clumsy gentleness.
The captain, the subaltern and the sergeant, still standing, are poring over a soiled map. Beyond the canal the ground rises gradually; the canal cutting reveals the chalk formation of
