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So Arthur had gone too. We had been great friends, not obvious inseparables, but joined securely by a deeper tie of understanding and being understood. Sometimes returning from patrol, we would break off and chase each other round the clouds, zooming their summits, plunging down their white precipitous flanks, darting like fishes through their shadowy crevasses and their secret caves: such pleasure lay in this that never did we seem more intimate than when we traced five-mile hyperbolas across the evening sky. And then to land, grin at each other, stroll into the Mess arm-in-arm, still mentally aloft, away up there, remembering the clouds, find me more true perfection! Sometimes we used to walk at night down to the stream in the valley that flowed under the poplars. He would quote some line of half forgotten poetry. I would take it up. Then a long pause, looking at the shadowy landscape, listening to the water, our cigarettes glowing fitfully. Or perhaps, turning to music, each of us would hear in the quietly hummed tune an orchestra behind it, sounding in our heads. At such times the war was quite forgotten. Was this quiet contemplative boy the hero of half a hundred fights? I could not reconcile the strange division, till one day, when I had praised him, he shrugged his shoulders; It was our job, he said, we ought to try and do it well, but when peace came, we could do better. When peace came! I hope the gunner of that Hun two-seater shot him clean, bullet to the heart, and that his plane, on fire, fell like a meteor through the sky he loved. Since he had to end. I hope he ended so. But, oh, the waste! The loss!
LEST WE FORGET
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