“I’m afraid I don’t follow you.”
“I mean, not one of them is alive—the way you and I are right here now. Not one can be—till the war’s over. The day it is over, those who happen to remain alive will find it out. That’s all.”
“I see. You know a lot about the RAF.”
“Everybody—in England—thinks about them a lot. Everybody owes ’em—whatever they happen to have.”
“Know any?”
Jimmie smiled. “Yeah. There was a field not very far from our lab. We made some special stuff for them to drop on Germany—now and then. Trial stuff. I used to—I got to be pals with a bunch of them.”
“I see.”
“They could tell you things!”
Jimmie began to tell those things. For half an hour—because of the ardent attention of his listener, because of his unexpected proffer of something very much like friendliness—Jimmie talked. He hadn’t told any of those tales in America. It did him good to unburden himself. For half an hour, in that corner of a clubroom, flack broke, machine guns stuttered, bombs screamed, motors droned and coughed, men died, men lived to tell of death, planes made their runs across the black and ruined ribs of cities embossed upon their incandescent streets, and the old man hung on the words of the young one.
When Jimmie stopped, apologetically, Mr. Wilson said, “You sound as if you’d seen it.”