Read The Wild Dark Flowers for Free Online

Avro to try and take pictures. He was dimly aware that his observer was dead, a bloody red mess behind him; somehow he had got hold of the camera case, and he felt the plane tilt as he partially released his grip on the controls to take the photograph.
    And then, absurdly, he was dreaming of sketching the lines below them. Trying to figure out which trench belonged to which side was something of a challenge—for it looked like someone had gone mad with an ink pen that dripped blotches between the hairsbreadth wriggling lines. But he knew all too poignantly that deep in the lines were thousands of living men, and deep in the blotches were shell holes, full of the dead.
    And all the time they shot at him from far below while he tried to keep a steady grip. “You bloody sods!” he muttered.
    The driver looked back at his passenger, saw he was asleep, and smiled to himself.
    Those photographs that Harry had helped to take mapped out Neuve Chapelle in March this year. Horrible Neuve Chapelle. Dreaming still, slumped in the depths of remembering, the strange otherworldliness of the images suddenly became more real. He was above Saint-Omer last year, and it was a clear, fine day. Harry looked over the side of the aircraft, his BE2, and he saw the Maubeuge road crowded with retreating troops.
    He had been so jaunty on those first few days last year, before everything went to hell. The BEF and the corps were chasing, chasing; they were pushing the Germans back. Or at least that was what was supposed. They were all innocents then. All optimists. All so supremely confident in the last few weeks of the summer of 1914.
    He tried to struggle out of the depths of sleep now; he didn’t want to see this picture: it was an awful, impotent memory. Because the BEF and the French didn’t chase the Germans away; my God, no. In just a few short hours, in silent mime below him, thousands streamed back the way they had come, the wounded being carried by men who threw away their rifles, artillery guns stuck in the center of the road, horses backing up, and in among them all civilians towing carts and cattle, and children running, screaming, in and out of the summer wheat that would never now be harvested.
    The retreat to Saint-Omer. The Battle of Mons, August 23. He and the other pilots had only landed in France ten days before. He had only got his commission in the Flying Corps a few days before that, and his Royal Aero Club certificate a week previously. He had thought that, despite all he had said about hating the air, his father had some hand in making things go so straight and true for him. But Harry hadn’t had time to see his father to thank him, or to go home to Rutherford. In what seemed like the blink of an eye, they were qualified, commissioned, and gone. Anyone who could fly a plane was in one.
    Harry had gone out and looked at the planes the night before they left England, and the light of day was very slow to fade—it was one of those balmy, lovely evenings of summer. And he stood alone and thought,
I am twenty years old. I am twenty years and two months old. And tomorrow I am going to war.
    The next day, he had crossed the Channel in a Farman, a ridiculous sloughy machine that wouldn’t go more than fifty or so miles an hour. He longed for the Blériot that a chap at Hendon had shown him; it went twenty miles faster. The Farman lumped over the Channel, and he had headed for Cap Gris Nez, the quickest route.
    It had taken him nearly an hour with a rough sea underneath him and a distrustful passenger, a driver who had been seconded into the role of mechanic and who prayed loudly all the way. Harry had never felt so desperately frightened or so exhilarated; not even his very first flight could compare to that crossing to France. He sat rigid and hunched, eyes on the controls, the plane, the sea, the horizon: it all became a jigsaw of navy blue and white. He kept thinking of the absurd luggage that he had with him, most particularly