Joan and Peter: The story of an education

by H. G. Wells

And the world of history and romance, the world in which he and all his ancestors had believed, a world seen in elevation, of towering frontages, high portals, inaccessible dignities, giddy pinnacles and frowning reputations, had now fallen as flat, it seemed, as the façade of the Cloth Hall at Ypres. (He had seen that one day from above, spread out upon the ground.) He was convinced that high above the things of the past he droned his liquid way towards a new sort of life altogether, towards a greater civilization, a world-wide life for men with no boundaries in it at all except the emptiness of outer space, a life of freedom and exaltation and tremendous achievement. But meanwhile the old things of the world were trying most desperately to kill him. Every day the enemy’s anti-aircraft guns seemed to grow more accurate; and high above the little fleecy clouds lurked the braggart Markheimer and the gallant von Papen and suchlike German champions, with their decoys below, ready to swoop and strike. Never before had the world promised Peter so tremendous a spectacle as it seemed to promise now, and never before had his hope of living to see it been so insecure.

When he had enlisted, and even after he had been transferred to the Flying Corps, Peter had thought very little of death. The thought of death only became prevalent in English minds towards the second year of the war. It is a hateful and unnatural thought in youth, easily dismissed altogether unless circumstances press it incessantly upon the attention. But even before Peter went to France two of his set had been killed under his eyes in a collision as they came down into the aerodrome, and a third he had seen two miles away get into a spiral nose dive, struggle out of it again, and then go down to be utterly smashed to pieces. In one day on Salisbury Plain he had seen three accidents, and two, he knew, had been fatal and one had left a legless thing to crawl through life. The messes in France seemed populous with young ghosts; reminiscences of sprees, talk of flying adventures were laced with, “dear old boy! he went west last May.” “Went west” was the common phrase. They never said “killed.” They hated the very name of death. They did their best, these dear gallant boys, to make the end seem an easy and familiar part of life, of life with which they were so joyously in love. They all knew that the dice was loaded against them, and that as the war went on the chances against them grew. The first day Peter was out in France he saw a man hit and brought down by a German Archie. Two days after, he found himself the centre of a sudden constellation of whoofing shells that left inky cloudbursts over him and under him and round about him; he saw the fabric of his wing jump and quiver, and dropped six hundred feet or so to shake the gunner off. But whuff ... whuff ... whuff, like the bark of a monstrous dog ... the beast was on him again within a minute, and Peter did two or three loops and came about and got away with almost indecent haste. He was trembling; he hated it. And he hated to tremble.

In the mess that evening the talk ran on the “Pigeon shooter.” It seemed that there was this one German gunner far quicker and more deadly than any of his fellows. He had a knack of divining what an airman was going to do. Peter admitted his near escape and sought counsel.

Peter’s colleagues watched him narrowly and unostentatiously when they advised him. Their faces were masks and his face was a mask, and they were keen for the faintest intonation of what was behind it. They all hated death, they all tried not to think of death; they all believed that there were Paladins, other fellows, who never thought of death at all. When the tension got too great they ragged; they smashed great quantities of furniture and made incredible volumes of noise. Twice Peter got away from the aerodrome to let things rip in Amiens. But such outbreaks were usually followed by a deep depression of spirit. In the night Peter would wake up and find the thought of death sitting by his bedside.

So far Peter had never had a fight. He had gone over the enemy lines five times, he had bombed a troop train in a station and a regiment resting in a village, he believed he had killed a score or more of Germans on each occasion and he felt not the slightest compunction, but he had not yet come across a fighting Hun plane. He had very grave doubts about the issue of such a fight, a fight that was bound to come sooner or later. He knew he was not such a quick pilot as he would like to be. He thought quickly, but he thought rather too much for rapid, steady decisions. He had the balancing, scientific mind. He knew that none of his flights were perfect. Always there was a conflict of intention at some point, a hesitation. He believed he might last for weeks or months, but he knew that somewhen he would be found wanting—just for a second perhaps, just in the turn of the fight. Then he would be killed. He hid quite successfully from all his companions, and particularly from his squadron commander, this conviction, just as he had previously hidden the vague funk that had invariably invaded his being whenever he walked across the grounds towards the machine during his days of instruction, but at the back of his mind the thought that his time was limited was always present. He believed that he had to die; it might be tomorrow or next week or next month, but somewhen within the year.

When these convictions became uppermost in Peter’s mind a black discontent possessed him. There are no such bitter critics of life as the young; theirs is a magnificent greed for the splendour of life. They have no patience with delays; their blunders and failures are intolerable. Peter reviewed his two-and-twenty years—it was now nearly three-and-twenty—with an intense dissatisfaction. He had wasted his time, and now he had got into a narrow way that led down and down pitilessly to where there would be no more time to waste. He had been aimless and the world had been aimless, and then it had suddenly turned upon him and caught him in this lobster-trap. He had wasted all his chances of great experience. He had never loved a woman or had been well loved because he had frittered away that possibility in a hateful sex excitement with Hetty—who did not even pretend to be faithful to him. And now things had got into this spin to death. It was exactly like a spin—like a spinning nose dive—the whole affair, his life, this war....

He would lie and fret in his bed, and fret all the more because he knew his wakefulness wasted the precious nervous vigour that might save his life next day.

After a black draught of such thoughts Peter would become excessively noisy and facetious in the mess tent. He was recognized and applauded as a wit and as a devil. He was really very good at Limericks, delicately indelicate, upon the names of his fellow officers and of the villages along the front—that was no doubt heredity, the gift of his Aunt Phyllis—and his caricatures adorned the mess. It was also understood that he was a rake....

Peter’s evil anticipations were only too well justified. He was put down in his very first fight, which happened over Dompierre. He had bad luck; he was struck by von Papen, one of the crack German fliers on that part of the front. He was up at ten thousand feet or so, more or less covering a low-flying photographer, when he saw a German machine coming over half a mile perhaps or more away as though it was looking for trouble. Peter knew he might funk a fight, and to escape that moral disaster, headed straight down for the German, who dropped and made off southward. Peter rejoicing at this flight, pursued, his eyes upon the quarry. Then from out of the sun came von Papen, swiftly and unsuspected, upon Peter’s tail, and announced his presence by a whiff of bullets. Peter glanced over his shoulder to discover that he was caught.

“Oh damn!” cried Peter, and ducked his head, and felt himself stung at the shoulder and wrist. Splinters were flying about him.