On Heroes
above Cambrai, France
October 1918
(Shirley)
I will die in approximately ninety seconds. My machine is a wreck, crushed by the midair collision that has already sent one Hun machine in a nose dive to oblivion. My engine's still sputtering along, but too many things are broken, rudder and wing and the propellor wobbling drunkenly. Gravity will pull me home to earth, faster and faster, until the ground opens to accept the mass of blood and bone and kinetic energy that I will impart to it. There will be another pockmark in the mud and I will be gone from all this.
I suppose I should be afraid. After all, I am only ninety seconds — or eighty seconds, rather — from finding out which of us was right about hell. But no, there is no lurch of panic, no heavy breathing or gritted teeth. Instead, I feel unaccountably light, like a billowing sail on the high sea of heaven. Plummeting, I am weightless.
There's an emotion there, for sure, and I feel around for its name. Certainly not dread. Not even resignation. I'm pretty sure it's relief.
An hour ago, we went out hunting over the lines. Streamers flying from my rudder and wings marked me as the leader, though there were only three aeroplanes in my flight. Fly light, fly fast. We soared high and higher, where the thin air is too cold and poor to breathe. That's our advantage: our S.E.5as can fly higher than any Hun machine, so we circle above and dive down on them like osprey fishing the shallows.
We were lucky, at first. I spotted a lone triplane, limping home from some other fight, and waggled my wings to tell Corcoran and Russell that we'd all go in together. I could have shot him down myself on the first pass, but better to give Russell the chance to build his confidence. I dove at the German, turning him directly into Russell's merciless burst. That made four victories for Russell. One more and I'd have to buy him a drink.
We climbed again to altitude with plenty of fuel and ammo. Far below, the trenches of Picardy were not scars so much as stitched wounds, jagged and black, with the sutures sticking out at unnatural angles. As if the doctor had done his best, but really, a wound like that was never going to heal cleanly and you couldn't expect much.
It was a quiet patrol. We crisscrossed the lines, back and forth, until my fuel gauge dipped below half and I began to think of turning for home. Better to return to the aerodrome, rest, try again tomorrow, than to get caught in a fight with no reserves.
Just then, movement below caught my eye and for a wild moment I thought it was a skein of geese, dark specks moving against the direction of the wind. The German Jastas have taken to flying in huge formations, fifteen or twenty or more all together. There's nothing we can do against those odds, so we hide out in the ether where even the Fokker D VIIs can't catch us. But these Huns are in pursuit of something, another RAF flight: four machines, maybe a bomber and its escort. They're too far away for me to hear their guns over my own engine, but they're peeling off now and spraying tracers, dipping and wheeling around and past one another.
They'll never see us coming.
Another wing-waggle and Corcoran and Russell follow me toward the fray, coming in from above and oblique. In a fight, you can't see anything but what's in front of you. Certainly not unexpected reinforcements dropping down from the heavens.
Screaming down in a nearly vertical dive. Rushing wind, a few stray tracers, bursts of machine gun fire near enough now. Pick a target. A Fokker chasing that two-seater round and round in circles; his mind will be occupied. I fall in behind and when the two-seater banks, I burst and burst and and burst again and am rewarded with streamers of black smoke. The Hun lurches, then begins to sag downward and soon he is in freefall, spinning. I'd follow him down to be sure — they do fake injuries by diving sometimes — but that smoke is pretty nasty looking and there's other work to do here.
If he stays down, he's my thirty-third kill.
Not that I've only killed thirty-three men, of course. I've shot down some two-seaters and an observation balloon, though the balloon boys have parachutes, lucky bastards, and may have gotten out with their skins intact. There are also the strafing runs, though those don't count. There's no glory in watching infantrymen cower, scurrying for shelter like rats as I murder them. The RAF only counts the other airmen, as if we are the only ones who matter.
Ten months ago, in Paris, December dawned in pale gray streaks that crept around the edges of the drapes. I counted his breaths as he slumbered, serene in the curve of my arm. Perhaps it was not dawn after all, but merely the reflection of the moon.
When we could delay no longer, I kissed him awake and watched grim recollection chase away the initial flash of joy that lit his eyes. I folded him close, faces buried in one another's shoulders as we stole a few more heartbeats.
We dressed one another from the skin out. Drawers, undershirts, socks, shirts, trousers, tunics, belts, boots. He worked my buttons without ever looking away from my face. When I had finished wrapping his puttees, he offered me the cord with his identity discs so that I might slip them back around his neck. Two tags, stamped with his regimental number and TC MEREDITH PRES CDN. The red circle is detachable, for reporting a casualty to battalion headquarters; the green octagon stays with the body.
I declined.
Instead, I warmed the gold enameled wings between my palms and pinned them to the inside of his breast pocket.
"That's good," he said. "I won't worry about losing it if the clasp comes undone."
"Good," I answered. "I don't want you to worry."
Two minutes ago, I turned back toward the swooping D VIIs as number thirty-three fell away, and saw immediately that one of our S.E.5as was in trouble. Maybe Russell, maybe Corcoran, maybe one from the other flight, who knows. But he had two Huns on his tail and they had him dead to rights.
Aerial combat is a geometry problem. Fixed points; oblique planes; accounting for the way gravity distorts speed in the climb and in the dive. Two opposing machines can chase one another round and round until their fuel runs out and never get in one another's range, but two against one and all the attackers have to do is assign one to hold you down while the other punches.
Full throttle, aiming not where they were but where I hoped they would be soon, I streaked across open air and came in from below, firing into the Huns' bellies. A good shot, a very good, and flames erupted from one of the fuel tanks. A terrific ball of fire tore a black, glowing hole in number thirty-four.
But I miscalculated. Flew too close. That Fokker, hit and flailing, tumbling at me, coming fast. Not shooting; smashing. I threw my machine hard over, but no use; a horrible, bone-jarring crunch and his burning wings flaked all around me. Acrid smoke seared my throat, his or mine, no way to tell. A piece of flaming wreckage plastered against my windshield, black and orange and alive with macabre delight. The Fokker burning, falling, tumbling end over end, and out of sight because I was also spinning and couldn't seem to pull out of it.
Four years ago, we sat together in the study at the manse on a rainy Saturday, home from Queen's and from Harbour Head, with a roaring fire in the grate and the whole house deserted. We lounged either end of the old plush sofa, with our feet tucked up together in the middle, calves and knees mingled as we read in contented silence.
He sighed over the top of his book and I asked what he was reading.
"Thomas Carlyle. On Heroes."
"For school?"
"I was just curious."
"The name?"
"Well, obviously it means something to Father," he said, shutting the cover. "I thought I should find out if it means something to me, too."
"And?"
He turned to an early page and read, "The history of the world is but the biography of Great Men."
I grimaced. "Great men? Like who?"
He chewed his lip, mumbled, "Like Dante."*
"Dante? Like Dante's Inferno?"
"The very same."
"Never read it," I said, hoping that would be the end.
He pulled his feet back, leaving cold patches where they had rested on my thighs. Padding over to the bookcase, he searched among volumes shoved higgledy-piggledy and sideways among the ruins of once-neat rows. It took a few minutes, but he found what he was looking for.
"It's a tour of hell," he said, riffling the pages. "Nine circles, each for a different type of sin."
"You don't have to read that," I said, sitting up, wary.
He waved me off and turned the pages purposefully. Finding what he wanted, he spoke quietly, but with grim determination. "Here it is. The Seventh Circle. The Circle of the Violent."
I might have laughed if there had been any lightness to him. Instead, he was sodden, as dreary as the gray rain rippling down the windowpanes. "Carl. Stop. The Violent? You can't even swat a mosquito."
"No," he whispered. "That would be Violence Against Our Neighbors, for warmongers and murderers. There's also Violence Against Ourselves for suicides and dissolutes . . ."
"Carl . . ."
"No, that's not me either. I'm the last: Violence Against God." He cleared his throat and read,
"Violence can be done the Deity . . .
By disdaining Nature and her bounty.
And for this reason doth the smallest round
Seal with its signet Sodom and Cahors,
All those who hate God with all their hearts . . ."**
"Stop."
"Don't you want to hear the punishment?" he asked, voice cracking. "O'er all the sand-waste, with a gradual fall, were raining down dilated flakes of fire . . ."
"Stop it." I was impatient and he looked up sharply at my sharper tone. I wanted to snatch the volume from his hand and feed it to the flames. Let hell keep its own. "It's just a poem, Carl," I said. "It's not even the Bible. It's just a poem. It isn't real."
"Just a poem?" he said, nodding toward the green-bound Whitman in my own lap. "What's all that then, other than poems?"
I spread my hands protectively over the open pages of Leaves of Grass, that companion that had been working a revolution within me since the first hour I spent poring, pausing, wondering, knowing that I intended to go on reading it.*** I didn't have it memorized, not yet, but I found that I had begun to think in its cadences.
The dark blue eyes, observant as ever, did not miss the meaning in my gesture. "I'm sure I've heard your mother say that poems are true, even if they aren't true in the same way as prose. Or maybe that was Walter."
Fair enough. That sounded like them, in any case. But I wasn't about to let this Seventh Circle business stand unchallenged.
"If that's true, then so is this," I said, thumbing through the Whitman until I found the eschatology that spoke to me as no sermon ever had:
I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.****
The words rang through me, resonating at a frequency that I knew as my own. This was it exactly: the present moment paramount, the reality and divinity of here and now.
"It's just a poem," he whispered. "It's not even the Bible. It isn't real."
"It is real," I flared.
I thought he might cry, but perhaps it was only firelight twitching across his face. "Which one?"
I will die in approximately seventy seconds. No help for it. Whatever that collision did, my machine is in tatters. Rudder bar useless, stick leaden. I heave and heave and manage to straighten out a little so that I'm falling at an angle, rather than straight down. Not spinning anymore, that's good. But I don't know what it does except maybe reset my clock back to eighty.
I'm definitely dying and no mistake. To be perfectly honest, this is better than I was expecting. I don't seem to be on fire. The wind has blown away the charred debris and left no lingering flames. That's good. We all hate the thought of burning to death and it looks like I will be spared that, at least.
There's also the good news from my last batch of letters: Jem alive and in Holland. Better and better. It's been something of a wrench these past few months, thinking that Mother and Dad would have to lose all three of us. But Jem's alive and it's a miracle and I'm glad for all of them. They'll get to keep him now and carry on the Blythe line. Thank God that bit never fell to me. There will be a next generation and they'll hear a good story about me, how I fought bravely and died well, like Walter, and never did anything to bring dishonor on the family name.
Sixty seconds. The news of Jem wasn't my only recent mail. Dante has come slinking back into Kit's letters. Flakes of fire. That's how he described his dreams, what he sees now, with his lost eye. I had hoped that we were done with all that, but it's bred too close to the bone in him. I would have him forget that hell, and every hell: the burning barn and the endless mud and the Violence Against God. God damn Dante. What made him an expert on hell, anyway?
Well, Kit will be able to put all that aside now. Without me around, there will be no more sneaking, no more worrying, no more fear of prison or lashes or hellfire. I can picture him without all that. Wading in the brook at home, sunlight in his hair, smiling in the green, soft, glad, safe valley. How long does he have? Fifty years at least. Maybe more! Not troubled, furtive, hidden years, either. This is better. Fifty years or more of tranquility, and his hope of heaven after.
Myself, I have about fifty seconds. I wonder whether he will marry. He can, now that I'm gone. I can see him teaching a little boy all the secrets of bugs and birds, the blue eyes restored in his son. I suppose that implies a wife. Well, he'll do right by her, whoever she is. They will make a home, keep a garden, read together on a sofa, and never, ever Dante. He will kiss her with lips at once softer and more determined than you would expect, with a smile always tucked away somewhere, ready to spring out at the lightest touch, buoyant.
Forty seconds and perhaps the rapid drop is finally getting to me because now I can feel the plummet in my stomach. I'll never see him again. He will live and live and live and I'll never hear him laugh or catch the scent of sweet flag off his clothes or feel his fingers twined through my hair, holding me fast while he urges me on.
Never? That can't be right. It's not the drop turning my guts to water now, but a rush of elemental terror. Never?
But what can I do about it? I'll be dead in thirty seconds. I pass over our lines, the trenches no longer sutures in the earth, but great muddy gashes not so very far below. I kick the bar below my boots, but I've got nothing from the rudder. One wing is in tatters. I haul on the stick, haul again, put everything I've got into it and gain a few more degrees, but not enough.
Come on. Really pull. So what if breaks off? There's nothing to lose now. I wrench, I yank, something slips, and slips again, and the stick is more responsive now. A bit. Am I doing it? Am I leveling off? Yes. Somewhat. Little good it will do me now, I'm still going to plow a new crater in the ground in twenty seconds. The machine itself will crush me, send its guts smashing through mine, go up in a fireball and burn me to a crisp in my harness.
Unless . . .
Unless I'm not in the plane when it goes in.
No time to examine that reckless thought.
Ten, I throw off my harness.
Nine, haul myself out of the cockpit.
Eight, plant my feet on the starboard wing.
Seven, grasp a cabane strut.
Six, lean in against the lashing wind.
Five, stand tall as I hurtle toward destruction.
Four, right here in this field.
Three, and it's now or never.
Two, and I'm sorry, Kit.
One . . . and I step off into open air.
"Is that him? The crazy son of a bitch who jumped?"*****
"Sure is. Flight Commander Blythe."
"Blythe? Lucky, more like. The devil's own."
I crack an eye to see two men standing over me. If this is hell, it smells of carbolic acid, not brimstone.
"You're awake!" says the shorter man. A doctor. He has darkish hair, but the light hurts my eyes and I can't get a good look at him through my squint.
"Awake?" I struggle to sit up.
"Don't trouble yourself, Blythe, don't trouble yourself. You had quite the crack-up there. Everyone's talking about it."
As he speaks, I take inventory. Heart: beating. Lungs: breathing. Though, ah, a sharp pain there. Arms: two. Hands: two. Legs and feet under a blanket but apparently whole. Head: splitting.
"Your commanding officer was here earlier. He said you'll have the Distinguished Flying Cross for this."
Another sharp pain for another breath. "Did he say . . . ah . . . what happened to the rest of my flight? Corcoran? And Russell?"
"Well, I don't know about that," the short doctor says amiably. "Perhaps we can find out. But I do know that you're very lucky, son. Couple of broken ribs. Some truly magnificent bruising. And I'm sure you've noticed the knock to the head."
Sledgehammer to the head.
"I'll . . . live?"
The shorter doctor laughs a piercing laugh that lacerates my brain and makes me see stars. "Goodness, yes. You just rest up a bit and you'll be good as new. I'm afraid they won't even send you home for this."
Home?
"They didn't . . . didn't send my parents a telegram, did they?"
"For some bruises and cracked ribs? Son, if the RAF sent a telegram every time a pilot got banged up in a landing, they'd do nothing else all the live long day."
Live . . . long . . .
Panic breaks over me and I startle, jarring my ribs so that I wince and gasp.
I'm not dead. I was supposed to die. And now . . .
Kit. He was supposed to have safety and heaven and a blue-eyed son. Am I so selfish that I would rather see him damned than give him up? What have I done?
The tall doctor is speaking now. "The ambulance driver who brought you in said it was the damnedest thing he ever saw. You crashed in full view of a battalion that had just come off the line. They say you stood up on the wing of the plane bold as Lucifer and jumped just before the crash. You rolled ass over teakettle and stood up under your own power before you passed out. Hell of a thing. The ambulance men said the entire battalion cheered the whole time they were loading you in. Bloody hero."
"I don't remember any of that," I murmur.
"That's alright," says the short doctor. "You're safe now, and no need to worry."
*Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was a Scottish philosopher whose most famous work is a compilation of his lectures called, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841). One of the lectures is called "The Hero as Poet," taking Dante and Shakespeare as its examples. Carl Meredith is named for Thomas Carlyle (John Knox Meredith is named for Scottish theologian John Knox).
As readers of "The Sun and the Other Stars" will no doubt remember, there is considerable danger in reading only the beginning of The Divine Comedy. Dante's work is not just Inferno; it is Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise.
**Longfellow's translation, with a slight modern clarification on the last line from the translation by Douglas Neff.
***The English poet, utopian socialist, and gay rights activist Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) was 25 when a friend handed him a book of Whitman's poems. In his autobiography, My Days and Dreams, Carpenter marks that day as a turning point in his life, saying, "I remember lying down then and there on the floor and for half an hour poring, pausing, wondering. I could not make the book out, but I knew at the end of that time that I intended to go on reading it . . . From that time forward a profound change set in within me. I remember the long and beautiful summer nights, sometimes in the College garden by the riverside, sometimes sitting at my own window which itself overlooked a little old-fashioned garden enclosed by grey and crumbling walls; sometimes watching the silent and untroubled dawn; and feeling all the time that my life deep down was flowing out and away from the surroundings and traditions amid which I lived — a current of sympathy carrying it westward, across the Atlantic. I wrote to Whitman, obtained his books from him, and occasional postcardial responses. But outwardly, and on the surface, my life went on as usual." Elsewhere in the same work: "[Whitman's] writings had been my companions, and had been working a revolution within me." These passages interest me not only because they are among the many testimonies of what Whitman meant to queer people living in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but because of their consideration of the tension between an internal experience and outward appearances.
****Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"
*****Shirley's crash is based on the crash of New Zealand RAF pilot Keith Caldwell in September of 1918 near Cambrai. Caldwell suffered a midair collision in his S.E.5a, climbed onto the wing, and jumped clear at the last moment. He was not substantially injured and was back in combat in October. He survived the war and served in WWII, eventually commanding the RNZAF. There are a few other accounts of RAF pilots landing while standing on their wings in dire circumstances, including Canadian RAF pilot Alan McLeod.
RAF (and other Allied) aircrew were not issued parachutes during WWI, though balloon crews usually were. German aircrews got parachutes at the very end of the war.
One stupid note: the Doc Manager will not allow me to type the name of the German aircraft being used in this battle. Its proper name is D . VII with no spaces, but any time I put the period in, the Doc Manager deletes it, so I just went with D VII, which is apparently acceptable to the gremlins.