The First of July(115)

The earth seemed to rise into a hill, so slowly that it was if I were giddy, and I probably blinked, assuming it was my eyes that were seeing wrongly, but then the hill burst with pressure from its very core, a sheet of light flashed and the ground came up to meet me, fast, for a second I thought I’d misjudged it and yet I exulted to think my end would be part of something so magnificent; there was nothing like it since God first created the earth and man upon it. It was almost an act of blasphemy, that we should hurl this world back at him. For the air itself developed an extraordinary force and my little plane rocked in the mightiness of its thrust as a beautiful column of earth and trees and men rose and went on rising upward and then, after a long moment’s suspension, fell back on itself, forming a ring of dust moving ever outward and, when it cleared, beneath it a bright, new-born crater of chalk, innocent, pristine. A grave or a womb?

But then, as he turned the page over, it was as if, in the next few lines, Theo had caught him red-handed.

Oh Ben, what have we seen? How can we ever return from it? If this should ever come to an end are we doomed to go on for ever, longing to return, longing for just one second more of this exquisite terror? This cleansing of the world? How can I speak of it at home, what can I say to Agnes? Who is Agnes? Who am I? How can I talk of poetry, hear music, or make the right noises when she shows me her pressed flowers, or tells me of the Mission or her father’s elevation or her mother’s nerves? After today I am done with that. Marriage, obligation, nations—all exploded into nothingness.

There were meteor showers this last week—natural wonders, Ben, that man has gazed at in awe since time began, and we saw nothing because we were blowing the sky apart, showing God what man could do without him.

Benedict let his arm drop. The last sentence seemed to combine elation with despair, and the writing traveled upward along the line, the letters becoming successively wider and less finished. He had never known a Theo who wrote like this, never thought him capable of such thoughts. Yet he was overwhelmed with misgivings.

He turned to the Primus, where the water had nearly boiled dry, and did a poor job of shaving without a mirror. Dabbed blood spots off his chin and looked around for his boots. But all the busying about had not distracted him enough, and he picked up Theo’s letter, if that’s what it was, and turned it over. His heart sped up. There was only one further short paragraph:

Oh Ben, patient Ben, who suffers for others, who can be so quietly angry at my awe, and, yes, sometimes delight, in destruction and my fascination with the means by which we ensure it. Loyal Ben, who knows me to be a liar and a thief and a boaster, who has seen me behave like a beast, and still loves me. You are wasted out there in the dry desert of lost faith because you would make such a very good Christian—of the quieter, more pacific sort, the turn-a-cheek sort. Ben, stay with me, I shall need a friend, a warrior-companion who was with me at the beginning and at the end of the world. Then we won’t be alone with it all. We can go forward together.

And then, more neatly, the old Theo suddenly reappeared: “Don’t worry, old chap. I haven’t gone off my rocker.” Below these few startling sentences there was the usual small drawing; this time the tiny aeroplane had feathery wings and its nose pointed upward. These were musical notes drawn in the cloud below it: e, d, c, f, e, d, f. He smiled, and the tension slipped away to be replaced by warmth.

“O, for the Wings of a Dove,” Mendelssohn’s anthem from Psalm 55.

For a few seconds Benedict sensed his heart beating erratically, and his cheeks burned even as he knew Theo’s were the fleeting thoughts and emotions of fatigue and hunger and fear, not helped by alcohol and the contents of the medicine chest. Despite himself, he read the page again, yet with more apprehension than the first time. Theo had shown him a future, and all he needed was to trust and be brave: was that it? Was he missing something? His brain moved slowly, perhaps from loss of blood; his arm throbbed.

He heard someone coming: footsteps moving heavily and fast toward the house.

“Captain Chatto, sir. You need to come. There’s been an accident, sir.” The soldier hadn’t even paused to knock but had burst into the room, apparently not registering the officer’s state of semi-dress.

“One of ours, sir, it’s come down. Just returning, sir, it’s on the field and smoking.”

Benedict frowned. “Our what?” He imagined some unexploded missile aimed at the enemy had failed and was now threatening to blow them all to kingdom come.

“A plane, sir. And he’s moving. And it’s like to catch fire. Two lads say he’s alive but his leg’s caught. They’ve gone for a surgeon.” The soldier’s eyes showed that he knew that this meant they would amputate a limb to get the man out. And they both knew the plane would have gone up long before then. “But the smoke’s getting worse and Sergeant Laughton pulled them back.”