"Where are you? Give us a hail so that we can find you!"
"Here--_here_! Hanging on the wing! Do come quickly--_do_ come--I can"t hang on any longer."
I hear the splash of oars, and then two strong arms slip under my armpits, and I am dragged up to the edge of the boat. I am utterly weak and can use no muscle at all, so for a moment or two they struggle with me, and then I fall over the side on to the floor, where I lie, a sodden, streaming, half-dead thing.
"Save my pal! Save my pal!" I cry.
Down the wing slides the other man, and suddenly I see it is not the pilot at all, but the back gunlayer.
"Where"s Roy? _Where"s Roy?_" I shout in a sudden dread.
"He never came up!" is the terrible answer.
"Oh! Save my pilot! Save my pilot!" I call out, bursting into sobs, partly with hysteria at the ending of the strain, partly with utter grief. "He was a wonderful chap ... one of the best ... one of the best.
Save him! Oh! Do save him! He can"t be dead! _Roy!_ Roy! He was the best chap there--ever--was."
It is too late. We are lucky to be picked up at all, for it is against regulations. The row-boat goes back to the little grey motor-launch which is protecting the monitor with a smoke-screen, and must go on at once. We are pulled on board. An anxious-eyed and evidently very busy naval officer comes to me.
"Are you wounded or anything?" he asks. "No? Good! I am so sorry we cannot wait to look for the other man. Go down to our cabin and get into blankets. I will send some whisky down! That noise? No! It"s not the monitor. It is fifteen-inch shrapnel sh.e.l.l being fired at us from Ostend!"
"Where are you going--anywhere near Dunkerque?" I ask.
"Yes! Going back now with the monitor! The stunt"s washed out--bad weather!"
"_Washed out!_ All wasted, all wasted. Oh! Roy! Roy!"
I crawl down a ladder and slowly, painfully, take off my heavy flying clothes. In a pool of water they lie on the floor, a sodden heap of leather and fur. Looking in the gla.s.s, I see an unfamiliar distorted face with a great enormous cheek, and wet hair plastered about the forehead.
Luckily the other man is not touched or damaged, and has been scarcely even wet, so he lies more or less at ease in his bunk. This is his first raid. He seems to a.s.sume that this terrible calamity is more or less a normal occurrence. Soon I am lying in blankets with a gla.s.s of whisky inside me. The mad panorama of the night goes rushing through my brain in ever-changing vivid scenes.
"Purvis! Are you awake?" I call to the bunk on the opposite side.
"Yes!"
"I say, you know--we are very very lucky. We have escaped every kind of death in a few seconds. If I were you I would say a prayer or two!"
"I have, old man!"
"Say one for Roy too, won"t you. Poor Roy--he was great! He never said a word of fear to the last. He never lost his head or anything!"
So in pain of body and mind I toss and turn in the little cabin with its swinging light, and hear the throb of the motor start and stop, increase and lessen, through long hours, till, for a while, I drift into an uneasy sleep....
_Zoop! Zoop!_ Suddenly sounds the old familiar sound of Mournful Mary bellowing with fear. _Boom!_ sounds a loud explosion.
I sit up in my blankets and shout across to the other bunk. "Mournful Mary! We must be back."
"I say, old man! Hear that? It"s Leugenboom firing! I can"t stand 15-inch sh.e.l.ls on the docks this morning--let"s get up and dress!"
After a while we borrow an a.s.sorted collection of naval garments, and at last climb on to the deck. It is a glorious sunny morning, and we lie in the middle of a little flotilla of neat grey-painted motor-launches lying side by side up to the tall stone wall of one of the docks. I can find no naval officer to thank, so walk from boat to boat till we reach the little iron ladder set in the quay-side, which we crawl up with difficulty till we are on the hot stone above. We start walking into Dunkerque, the back gunlayer in socked feet; myself with bare head, hair over my eyes, and back stooped in pain.
It is a strange walk. We are amidst civilisation, as it were, and people look curiously at us. I stop a naval car. The driver pulls up with evident reluctance.
"We are two naval flying officers--have just come down out to sea off Ostend--we are not well--can you give us a lift?"
"No, sir! Ration car!" In goes the clutch, away moves the car and its smart, rather contemptuous driver.
I stop another car. Again in an unfamiliar voice I begin my recitation--
"We are two naval flying officers--have just ..."
"Sorry, sir--got to fetch the mails!"
No one will help us. No car will give us a.s.sistance, though we are obviously in trouble. Too far away from these people is war for them to realise that from war"s greatest menace we have just escaped.
We go into the French police office at the docks. There by the kindly uniformed officials we are courteously treated. They, at least, make an attempt to telephone through to our squadron.
Tired at the delay, feeling I must move and move through this unreal city of sunshine and order, which lies so strangely about the dim shadows of my soul, I go on, and, stopping a car, order the driver to take me to the Wing Headquarters. The car is full of chairs, which are being taken to some concert hall, and perhaps the driver realises vaguely that the service does eventually touch reality, that there is some remote possibility of accident, some remote chance of calamity, up there, "towards the lines."
Through the dirty but splendidly familiar streets of Dunkerque we drive, out through the fortification to the pink-and-white villas of Malo. I am driving to the Wing Headquarters first, because I feel that a report should be made at once to the Wing Commander.
We turn at last through a great stone gate, and circling round a drive, stop at the bottom of a flight of steps, up which I slowly climb. By the door stands an orderly.
"Where"s the--Wing Commander--Mr--Fowler--I--want--anybody?"
"In the breakfast-room, sir--just down on the left," he says.
I walk down the pa.s.sage with a strange feeling of fear. Now I have returned to some definite place, to an organisation which can comprehend me, the ending of the strain is bringing a strange dizziness.
I open the tall door and enter.
Two officers at their breakfast table look at me, and then slowly stand up in utter amazement with opening mouths and wide eyes. In a second of time I see the broken egg-sh.e.l.l on the plate, the carelessly folded napkins, a half-empty toast-rack.
"Bewsher! Paul! Why--why--where have you been?"
"Haven"t you heard? Hasn"t--didn"t the Monitor tell you?" I asked dully.
"No. This is the first we have seen of you. Oh! I am glad you are all right. Where"s Roy?"
"Roy! Roy! Oh! He"s dead, dead--dead--in the sea--drowned in the wreck...." And throwing myself on a seat, I drop my face on to my arms on the table and burst into sobs, which shake my weary frame to the bones as the scalding tears well from my tired bruised eyes.
Follows in my memory picture after picture--of lying for a few hours in my little bed in the familiar cabin at the aerodrome, and of Jimmy bending over me with his face drawn with anxiety, telling me of the tragedy of the night, of Bob and Jack missing, of machines crashing: of the Friends Hospital at Dunkerque in a little wood where we awoke at dawn to hear the thunder of the 15-inch sh.e.l.ls bursting on the docks: of the Red Cross city at etaples: of yet another hospital in the green silence of Eton Square: of convalescence in the dream-garden of a great house in Buckinghamshire.
One night I rode into Paddington and found Jack Hudson awaiting me.
Three months was it since I had dined with him on the tragic night of April 10. He told me how, an hour after my accident, he had landed with a sh.e.l.l-shattered engine in Holland; he had struck a ca.n.a.l at 75 miles an hour, and had been upside down under water with his feet fixed on the wreckage, and his machine had caught fire on top of him, and how by burrowing down into the mud he had managed to free himself and to escape. Unchanged by our experiences which we related as interesting stories, we wandered happily along the twilight streets.
Infinitely remote, like a scarce-remembered dream, is the war to me to-day. I seem ever to have been a civilian, ever to have strolled at ease down sunlit terraces of London through the drowsy hours of an English spring--but every night with the slow approach of azure twilight I feel a strange stirring in my heart. As the first primrose star blooms in the east, I seem to hear the roar of starting engines, and when, in cold and sublime beauty, a silver moon rides high in the vast immensity of the night, I yearn with an almost unbearable pain to be once more sitting far above a magic moonlit world, to be moving ever onwards through the dim sky, where here and there the white waiting arms of the searchlights swoop and linger amidst the stars; where, beautiful and enchanted, there rises in the distance a long curving chain of green twinkling b.a.l.l.s.
_Dusk is our dawn, and midnight is our noon!
And for the sun we have the radiant moon.