§ 23
Those were years of swift marryings, and Peter was a young married man when presently he was added to the number of that select company attached to sausage-shaped observation balloons who were sent up in the mornings and pulled down at nights along the British front. He had had only momentary snatches of matrimony before the front had called him back to its own destructive interests, but his experiences had banished any lingering vestiges of his theory that there is one sort of woman you respect and another sort you make love to. There was only one sort of woman to love or respect, and that was Joan. He was altogether in love with Joan, he was sure he had never been in love before, and he was now also extravagantly in love with life. He wanted to go on with it, with a passionate intensity. It seemed to him that it was not only beginning for him, but for every one. Hitherto Man had been living down there, down on those flats—for all the world is flat from the air. Now, at last, men were beginning to feel how they might soar over all ancient limitations.
Occasionally he thought of such things up in his basket, sitting like a spectator in a box at a theatre, with the slow vast drama of the western front spread out like a map beneath his eyes, with half Belgium and a great circle of France in sight, the brown, ruined country on either side of No Man’s Land, apparently lifeless, with its insane tangle of trenches and communicating ways below, with the crumbling heaps of ruined towns and villages scattered among canals and lakes of flood water, and passing insensibly into a green and normal-looking landscape to the west and east, where churches still had towers and houses roofs, and woods were lumps and blocks of dark green, fields manifestly cultivated patches, and roads white ribbons barred by the purple poplar shadows. But these spectacular and speculative phases were rare. They came only when a thin veil of haze made the whole spacious prospect faint, so that beyond his more immediate circle Peter could see only the broad outlines of the land. Given worse conditions of the weather and he would be too uncomfortable for philosophy; given better and he would be too busy.
He sat on a canvas seat inside the square basket with his instruments about him, or leant over the side scrutinizing the details of the eastward landscape. Upon his head, over his ears, he wore a telephone receiver, and about his body was a rope harness that linked him by a rope to the silk parachute that was packed neatly in a little swinging bucket over the side of his basket. Under his hand was his map board, repeating the shapes of wood and water and road below. The telephone wire that ran down his mooring rope abolished any effect of isolation; it linked him directly to his winch on a lorry below, to a number of battery commanders, to an ascending series of headquarters; he could always start a conversation if he had anything practical to say. He was, in fact, an eye at the end of a tentacle thread, by means of which the British army watched its enemies. Sometimes he had an illusion that he was also a kind of brain. When distant visibility was good he would find himself hovering over the war as a player hangs over a chessboard, directing fire upon road movements or train movements, suspecting and watching for undisclosed enemy batteries, or directing counter-battery fire. Above him, green and voluminous, hung the great translucent lobes of his gas bag, and the loose ropes by which it was towed and held upon the ground swayed and trailed about his basket.
It was on one of his more slack afternoons that Peter fell thinking of how acutely he now desired to live. The wide world was full of sunshine, but a ground haze made even the country immediately below him indistinct. The enemy gunners were inactive, there came no elfin voices through the telephone, only far away to the south guns butted and shivered the tranquil air. There was a faint drift in the air rather than a breeze, and the gas bag had fallen into a long, lazy rhythmic movement, so that sometimes he faced due south and sometimes south by east and so back. A great patch of flooded country to the north-east, a bright mirror with a kind of bloom upon it, seemed trying with an aimless persistency to work its way towards the centre of his field of vision and never succeeding.
For a time Peter had been preoccupied with a distant ridge far away to the east, from which a long-range gun had recently taken to shelling the kite balloons towards evening as they became clear against the bright western sky. Four times lately this new gun had got on to him, and this clear and tranquil afternoon promised just the luminous and tranquil sunset that favoured these unpleasant activities. It was five hours to sunset yet, but Peter could not keep his mind off that gun. It was a big gun; perhaps a 42 centimetre; it was beyond any counter-battery possibility, and it had got a new kind of shell that the Germans seemed to have invented for the particular discomfort of Peter and his kind. It had a distinctive report, a loud crack, and then the “whuff” of high explosive, and at every explosion it got nearer and nearer to its target, with a quite uncanny certainty. It seemed to learn more than any gun should learn from each shot. It was this steadfast approach to a hit that Peter disliked. That and the long pause after the shell had started. Far away he would see the flash of the gun amidst the ridges in the darkling east. Then would come a long, blank pause of expectation. For all he could tell this might get him. Then the whine of the shell would become audible, growing louder and louder and lower and lower in note; Phee-whoo! Crack! WHOOF! Then Peter would get quite voluble to the men at the winch below. He could let himself up, or go down a few hundred feet, or they could shift his lorry along the road. Until it was dark he could not come down, for a kite balloon is a terribly visible and helpless thing on the ground until it has been very carefully put to bed. To come down in the daylight meant too good a chance for the nearer German guns. So Peter, by instructing his winch to lower him or let him up or shift, had to dodge about in a most undignified way, up and down and backwards and sideways, while the big gun marked him and guessed at his next position. Flash! “Oh, damn!” said Peter. “Another already!”
Silence. Anticipations. Then: Phee—eee—eee—whoo. Crack! WHOOF! A rush of air would set the gas bag swinging. That was a near one!
“Where am I?” said Peter.
But that wasn’t going to happen for hours yet. Why meet trouble half way? Why be tormented by this feeling of apprehension and danger in the still air? Why trouble because the world was quiet and seemed to be waiting? Why not think of something else? Banish this war from the mind.... Was he more afraid nowadays than he used to be? Peter was inclined to think that now he was more systematically afraid. Formerly he had funked in streaks and patches, but now he had a steady, continuous dislike to all these risks and dangers. He was getting more and more clearly an idea of the sort of life he wanted to lead and of the things he wanted to do. He was ceasing to think of existence as a rather aimless series of adventures, and coming to regard it as one large consecutive undertaking on the part of himself and Joan. This being hung up in the sky for Germans to shoot at seemed to him to be a very tiresome irrelevance indeed. He and Joan and everybody with brains—including the misguided people who had made and were now firing this big gun at him—ought to be setting to work to get this preposterous muddle of a world in order. “This sort of thing,” said Peter, addressing the western front, his gas bag, and so much of the sky as it permitted him to see, and the universe generally, “is ridiculous. There is no sense in it at all. None whatever.”
His dream of God, as a detached and aloof personage, had taken a very strong hold upon his imagination. Or, perhaps, it would be truer to say that his fevered mind in the hospital had given a caricature personality to ideas that had grown up in his mind as a natural consequence of his training. He had gone on with that argument; he went on with it now, with a feeling that really he was just as much sitting and talking in that queer, untidy, out-of-the-way office as swaying in a kite balloon, six thousand feet above Flanders, waiting to be shot at.
“It is all very well to say ’exert yourself,’” said Peter. “But there is that chap over there exerting himself. And what he is doing with all his brains is just trying to wipe my brains out of existence. Just that. He hasn’t an idea else of what he is doing. He has no notion of what he is up to or what I am up to. And he hasn’t the sense or ability to come over here and talk about it to me. He’s there—at that—and he can’t help himself. And I’m here—and I can’t help myself. But if I could only catch him within counter battery range——!
“There’s no sense in it at all,” summarized Peter, after some moments of grim reflection. “Sense hasn’t got into it.”
“Is sense ever going to get into it?
“The curious thing about you,” said Peter, addressing himself quite directly to his Deity at the desk, “is that somehow, without ever positively promising it or saying anything plain and definite about it, you yet manage to convey in an almost irresistible manner, that there is going to be sense in it. You seem to suggest that my poor brain up here and the brains of those chaps over there, are, in spite of all appearance to the contrary, up to something jointly that is going to come together and make good some day. You hint it. And yet I don’t get a scrap of sound, trustworthy reasoning to help me to accept that; not a scrap. Why should it be so? I ask, and you just keep on not saying anything. I suppose it’s a necessary thing, biologically, that one should have a kind of optimism to keep one alive, so I’m not even justified in my half conviction that I’m not being absolutely fooled by life....
“I admit that taking for example Joan, there is something about Joan that almost persuades me there must be something absolutely right about things—for Joan to happen at all. Yet isn’t that again just another biologically necessary delusion?... There you sit silent. You seem to say nothing, and yet you soak me with a kind of answer, a sort of shapeless courage....”
Peter’s mind rested on that for a time, and then began again at another point.
“I wonder,” said Peter, “if that chap gets me tonight, what I shall think—in the moment—after he has got me....”