At Some Disputed Barricade_ A Novel - Anne Perry [111]
“Thank you.” Joseph found himself off balance with the speed of the decision, but he could not afford to question it. He thanked Vine again, and followed Jones-Williams over to the low, rather rambling buildings at the side. He felt grateful now for time to prepare himself for the flight.
But all the imagination of his life was futile compared with the reality. First there was climbing up onto the wing and into the small seat and fastening the harness to hold him in. The engine was started with a tremendous roar, then a moment later the tiny, frail craft went racing over the grass, bumping on every tussock, before lifting off jerkily. The plane bucked slightly, catching the light wind and clearing the neighboring stand of trees by what felt like no more than a few feet.
It was an appalling sensation, being out of touch with the earth—and apparently completely out of control. Joseph felt he was a prisoner.
He was sitting behind the pilot. A lightweight machine gun—a Lewis gun, to be precise—was mounted beside him. He had been told cheerfully that it was just in case they should meet any opposition.
They seemed to veer around quite badly as they gained height. Joseph had the very alarming feeling that he could be pitched out any moment and find himself falling through the air. Was he high enough up that it would kill him outright? Or might he be left broken but alive? Why on earth could he not have left well enough alone and stayed on the ground?
Then there was the question of keeping his stomach in place.
They were a few hundred feet up now and steadying. He could see nothing but trees slightly below him. The airfield and control tower were somewhere over to the left.
He steeled himself to look down, afraid of an overpowering sense of vertigo, but below him and stretching into the distance he saw a landscape that took his breath away. There was a strip of desolation a few miles wide, ruined, it would seem, beyond recall. It was cratered with shell holes that steamed in the August warmth—or perhaps it was poison gas that curled yellow-white in the hollows.
Blasted tree trunks poked up here and there. The wreckage of vehicles and guns was easy to see by outline rather than any difference in color. Everything was gray-brown, leached of life. Shape also distinguished the corpses of men and horses, too many to count. From up here the sheer enormity of it was overwhelming. So many dead, enough men to populate cities, and all destroyed.
Faint sunlight gleamed on the watery surfaces of trenches in recognizably straight lines, zigzagged to block the lines of fire. Two long stretches were waterlogged, like some gray mire, dotted with corpses.
He could see men moving around, foreshortened, dun-colored like the clay. Up here it was ridiculous how anonymous they seemed, and yet he probably knew all of them. He understood what they were doing only because he knew; he had done it all himself: shoring up walls, carrying supplies, cleaning weapons. A few cars chugged slowly on pockmarked roads, sending little puffs of exhaust out behind them. Judith might be in one of them, seeming to crawl along compared with the crazy speed of the plane. Ambulances were easy to spot. Columns of men moved on foot, reinforcements going forward, wounded going back. It was also easy to see the field guns, the huts and tents, the dressing stations, and the first aid posts. Some of the humps in the ground he knew were dugouts.
The plane gained more altitude, and Joseph could see the German lines as well. He knew their trenches were deeper, their dugouts better organized—and better furnished, so he had heard. But the land was the same: shattered and poisoned. The men, such as he could see, were engaged in the same activities. They, too, when motionless, catching an hour or two of sleep, blended