“Well, Doug, it looks like work outside now.”
And Campbell, delightfully intimate with the biggest name in A.E.F. flying, laughed and said: “Sure, somebody has to work to make up for all you gold-bricks.”
Only Campbell was kidding. Of course, Luf wasn’t really gold-bricking. He was down with a pretty high temperature, he was stretched out on his bunk. The bunk, if nothing else, proved his greatness for it wasn’t a plank-bottomed, uncomfortable bunk over which you dropped a mattress and were content. No. Luf’s bunk was made out of the rubber shock-absorbed wrappings off defective undercarriages—and gentlemen that was luxury then.
Luf had his boots off, his blouse was unbuttoned and his Sam Browne belt was unhooked. He didn’t look like the fellow whose name was in all the headlines back home. His hands were clasped behind his neck, his little mustache wiggled fraternally as he smiled... Luf was forever smiling in a sort of futility, as if he sensed the finish.
Across his blouse were six ribbons in a double row, and one of them was unclasped and sticking out at right angle. Dorman remembered that; he was sitting on an empty five-gallon wine keg marveling at the indifference of the men who come to grips with death and for whom each moment may be the last. That ribbon, for example. Solid blue bar, it was; with thin red and white pipings at the ends. The D.S.C. And there it was about to fall to the ground. A lot Luf seemed to care.
Laughter and talk and jokes...
Silly sort of war, Dorman reflected. Damned silly. Like a play. Here gathered the great and the near-great to laugh and talk in raucous tones of women and leaves and leaves and women... and sometimes, (not often) of the narrow squeaks they’d had. Luf told them of what a hell of a show it was that day up at Rancourt, on the Peronne-Bapaume highway, when C-3, which was Guynemer’s outfit, got in a mess and had to be helped out by Bert Hall, Pavelka, him and a couple of others out of the Lafayette.
“A great scrap,” Luf had said. And then he had looked up at the little roof and went on. “I wonder if our kids’ll read about it fifty years from now?”
And then he had laughed.
Indifferent. Hard. Cold-steel. Dorman wondered if this were necessary to greatness.