Flight to Arras Read Online Free PDF Page A

plane, time has ceased to run sterile through my fingers. Now, finally, I am installed in my function. Time is no longer a thing apart from me. I have stopped projecting myself into the future. I am no longer he who may perhaps dive down the sky in a vortex of flame. The future is no longer a haunting phantom, for from this moment on I shall myself create the future by my own successive acts. I am he who checks the course and holds the compass at 313°. Who controls the revolutions of the propeller and the temperature of the oil. These are healthy and immediate cares. These are household cares, the little duties of the day that take away the sense of growing older. The day becomes a house brilliantly clean, a floor well waxed, oxygen prudently doled out.... Thinking which, I check the oxygen flow, for we have been rising fast and are at twenty-two thousand feet already.
    â€œOxygen all right, Dutertre? How do you feel?”
    â€œFirst-rate, Captain.”
    â€œYou, gunner! How’s your oxygen?”
    â€œI ... er ... Shipshape, sir,”
    â€œHaven’t you found that pencil yet?”
    And I am he who checks his machine guns, putting a finger on button S, on button A.... Which reminds me.
    â€œGunner! No good-sized town behind you, in your cone of fire?”
    â€œEr ... all clear, sir.”
    â€œCheck your guns. Let fly.”
    I hear the blast of the guns.
    â€œWork all right?”
    â€œWorked fine, sir.”
    â€œAll of them?”
    â€œEr ... yes, sir. All of them.”
    I test my own and wonder what becomes of all the bullets that we scatter so heedlessly over our home territory. They never kill anyone. The earth is vast.
    Now time is nourishing me with every minute that passes. I am a thing as little the prey of anguish as a ripening fruit. Of course the circumstances of this flight will change round me. The circumstances and the problems. But I dwell now well inside the fabrication of the future. Time, little by little, is kneading me into shape. A child is not frightened at the thought of being patiently transmuted into an old man. He is a child and he plays like a child. I too play my games. I count the dials, the levers, the buttons, the knobs of my kingdom. I count one hundred and three objects to check, pull, turn, or press. (Perhaps I have cheated in counting my machine-gun controls at two—one for the fire-button, and another for the safety-catch.) Tonight when I get back I shall amaze the farmer with whom I am billeted. I shall say to him:
    â€œDo you know how many instruments a pilot has to keep his eye on?”
    â€œHow do you expect me to know that?”
    â€œNo matter. Guess. Name a figure.”
    â€œWhat figure?”
    My farmer is not a man of tact.
    â€œAny figure. Name one.”
    â€œSeven.”
    â€œOne hundred and three!”
    And I shall smile with satisfaction.
    Another thing contributes to my peace of mind—it is that all the instruments that were an encumbrance while I was dressing have now settled into place and acquired meaning. All that tangle of tubes and wiring has become a circulatory network. I am an organism integrated into the plane. I turn this switch, which gradually heats up my overall and my oxygen, and the plane begins to generate my comfort. The oxygen, incidentally, is too hot. It burns my nose. A complicated mechanism releases it in proportion to the altitude at which I fly, and I am flying high. The plane is my wet-nurse. Before we took off, this thought seemed to me inhuman; but now, suckled by the plane itself, I feel a sort of filial affection for it. The affection of a nursling.
    My weight, meanwhile, is comfortably distributed over a variety of points of support. I am like a feeble convalescent stripped of bodily consciousness and lying in a chaise-longue. The convalescent exists only as a frail thought. My triple thickness of clothing is without weight in my seat. My parachute, slung behind, lies against the