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.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 into the earth and became almost invisible.The terrain was becoming less distinct as they climbed higher.Beyond, the green was visible again, in both directions: Trees had leaves; there were patches of grass.On toward the horizon to the south and west there were the dark scars of roads and railways, but they lay across cornfields and meadows, and soft, blurred patches of woodland.Here and there Joseph saw the silver curl of a river.It was like looking at the track of a wound across the land, or the scorched path of shrapnel through flesh, leaving the rest oddly whole.For three long, terrible years they had faced each other over those few thousand yards of ground, and killed—and killed—repeatedly.It was madness! In the silence up here with nothing but wind and sun and the shattering roar of the engine, it was so obvious he wanted to lean over and shout invectives at them.But of course no one could hear him.He might as well scream at an anthill.They were moving east and south.He saw railway tracks and marshaling yards.He thought he recognized some of the features of the land, the curve of hill and river.He saw what he thought was Lille, but he was not sure how far they had come.Half an hour passed in silence.He searched the sky nervously, but there were no other aircraft visible.The French lines below them looked the same as the British or Canadian: just gray mud, wreckage, what one could make out of men moving about the same midday duties.When was Vine going to go low enough for him to have any idea if there were men moving eastward? So far they had followed the battle line southeast as it curved away from the advancing German army.Had they not gone far enough yet? He had lost any sense of where they were.The ground was so far below he could barely make out the roads, let alone who was moving on them.Perhaps this was an idiotic cause anyway, and Jones-Williams had let him come only because he had no imaginable chance of succeeding.He leaned forward and shouted at Vine, and as he turned for a moment, Joseph pointed downward.Vine held out his hand, thumb up, and obediently swooped the plane low, hedgehopping, as Jones-Williams had called it [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]