Ash and Gold

I.

The sortie order had Tom Ashford's name on line 81.

He stood in the hangar at 4:17 in the morning, the Lincolnshire fog pressing against the Lancaster's wings like a living thing, and read his name printed on the clipboard with the same detached curiosity he might have used to read a train schedule. Eighty-one. The eightieth mission for his squadron in as many days. The eighty-first individual sortie for a crew that had, statistically, already outlived itself by fifty percent.

"Chesley's acting up again," said George, the bomb aimer, tapping the optical sight with a knuckle that had been broken twice and set poorly. "Joey's got it taped. Again."

"Chewing gum this time?" Tom asked.

"Nothing left of the gum. It's just tape and hope."

Tom smiled. It was a small smile, the kind that involves no teeth. He was twenty-two, fresh from Oxford where he had read classics—Homer, Virgil, the stuff that taught you how civilizations ended but not how they began. He had volunteered for Bomber Command three months after graduating, for a reason he could not articulate and no one had asked him to articulate. "If my grandfather died for an empire and my father lost a leg for the same empire," he had told his tutor, "I suppose I should at least find out what the empire is worth."

The tutor had not known what to say.

Now, standing in the fog beside a machine that weighed thirty tons and carried fourteen tons of explosives over country that wanted them dead, Tom thought that his tutor might have said: You will find out on Tuesday.

Eight crew members. Tom—the navigator, though technically he was acting as bomb aimer because the real bomb aimer had been wounded on sortie 47 and never returned to operational flight. Flying Officer Cole—the pilot, solid, methodical, the kind of man who checked his instruments not because he was nervous but because he believed order was a moral position. Lieutenant Brooks—the navigator, who could read a map the way other men read love letters. And then George, Jimmy, and the three gunners in the tail, who spent their lives curled in a space no larger than a cupboard, waiting for things they could not see.

The engine started with a sound like the earth tearing itself open. Then another. Then the rest of the flight, forty Lancasters and Halifaxes rolling out of the fog into a dawn that was not yet light, their navigation lights blinking in sequence like a row of candles being lit by a wind that did not yet know it would blow them out.

II.

Between January 1943 and May 1945, Tom Ashford flew eighty-one sorties over Germany.

He did not count them at first. The squadron counted them. The squadron counted everything: fuel consumption, ammunition expenditure, anti-aircraft shells observed, flak bursts within two thousand yards, average altitude, cloud cover percentage. Tom's personal count was a different thing. It was the number of nights he had spent above a country he had never visited, dropping fire on cities whose streets he would never walk, returning to a base in Lincolnshire where the food was poor and the warmth was inadequate and the men spoke in voices that had gone permanently lower, as if the experience of war had compressed their lungs and with them their capacity for easy speech.

He wrote to Clara Brennan every night. Not every night—he could not write when his hands were shaking, and they shook often enough, in the hours after a sortie, when the adrenaline had burned itself out and left him hollow and vibrating like a plucked wire.

His letters were not love letters. They were descriptions.

Clara, tonight we flew over Berlin and the city looked like a chessboard that someone had set on fire. The searchlights moved across the clouds like the arms of giants trying to catch something they could not name. I could not see the target—we were in cloud for forty minutes over Paderborn—and when we broke through, the ground was already burning, and I could not tell which fires were ours and which were older, from the raids before. It looks the same from eight thousand feet. All fires look the same from above.

Clara, George lost his left eye on the Dortmund run. Not from flak—from the pressure. The cabin depressurized at altitude and his ear did not pop and his eye did not either. The doctor said it was mechanical. George said it was the sky pushing back. We buried his medals in a tin box behind the hangar. He would have wanted them near the plane, he said. So they would not forget each other.

Clara, I dream of your piano. Not the one in the shelter—the broken one you dragged from the ruins of the South Ken piano shop. The one with three keys that stick. I dream of you sitting at it in the dark, playing Bach for people who are trying not to think about the sound of planes overhead. You told me once that music is what you do when words stop working. I understand that now. I have run out of words, Clara. I have been writing them into letters that may never reach you, and I realize now that I was not writing for you. I was writing to keep the words from leaving me entirely.

Clara kept every letter. She read them in the South Ken shelter, standing on the platform beneath the tracks, surrounded by three hundred people who had come down into the dark to escape the light. She read them by the flickering glow of a single bulb that someone had rigged to the station's emergency system, and when she finished a letter, she would turn to the piano—its three sticky keys, its chipped varnish, its missing pedal—and she would play what Tom had described. The fires over Berlin. The searchlights like giant arms. The chessboard burning.

The people in the shelter would stop talking. They would stand in a circle around the piano and listen, and someone would say: Listening to Tom's letters is more likely to remind you why we're here than any sermon from the bishop.

Clara would play until her fingers ached. Then she would play more.

III.

The Bremen mission was scheduled for January 1944.

The weather report was bad. Cloud cover at ninety percent. Visibility near zero. Tom stood in the briefing room and listened to the intelligence officer describe the target: Bremen's industrial district, specifically the aircraft factories on the city's eastern edge. "Primary target is the Messerschmitt assembly plant," the officer said. "Secondary is the fuel depot adjacent. We expect heavy flak—Bremen has one of the densest anti-aircraft networks in the Ruhr. Estimated fighter opposition: moderate to heavy."

"What about the cloud cover?" Flying Officer Cole asked.

The intelligence officer paused. "Acceptable."

"Acceptable?" Brooks, the navigator, leaned forward. "Sir, ninety percent cloud means we cannot see the target. If we cannot see the target, the bomb aimer cannot use the Chesley. He has to drop blind. Blind bombing at that altitude has a circular error of at least two thousand yards. We could miss the factory by a mile."

"Then aim as close as you can."

Tom looked at Cole. Cole looked at the map. The map showed Bremen in red lines, the factory marked with a black square, and Tom understood, for the first time with full and uncomprehending clarity, what was happening.

This was not a military decision. It was arithmetic.

Above them, the Air Ministry needed a statistic: one thousand aircraft sorties against Bremen in January, to demonstrate Allied air superiority to the Russians, to the Americans, to everyone. The cloud cover was unacceptable for precision bombing. But acceptable for the statistic. The statistic was more important than the precision. The statistic was more important than the seventy-two men in Tom's squadron who would fly that night. And the seventy-two men, in turn, were a variable in a larger equation that included the eight hundred and forty-three aircraft scheduled for the mission.

Eight hundred and forty-three planes. That was the number. Eight hundred and forty-three. And the casualty estimate, whispered in the corridors of Bomber Command, was one hundred and seventy-four.

One hundred and seventy-four men. Not percentage points. Not statistics. One hundred and seventy-four individual men, each with a name, each with someone reading his letters in a shelter, each with a mother who had kissed his forehead and told him to come home.

Tom went to the hangar and looked at his Lancaster. The fog had lifted slightly. The moon was a thin slice of bone in a dark sky. He placed his hand on the wing and felt the metal, cold and solid and indifferent.

If I do not go, he thought, someone else goes. If someone else goes, I have to hear about it. So I go.

It was not courage. It was not cowardice. It was a logic so simple and so inescapable that it removed the question of choice entirely.

IV.

The raid began at 21:43 hours.

Eight hundred and forty-three aircraft lifted into the night sky, their engines creating a sound that can only be described as the earth groaning. Tom's Lancaster rode the edge of the formation, slightly behind the lead group, slightly above the midline, positioned in a section of the sky that the German defenders would have to cover with flak, hope, and the desperate geometry of anti-aircraft prediction.

They crossed the Dutch coast at 22:17. The cloud layer was thick and uniform, a blanket of grey-white that swallowed the ground and replaced it with void. Brooks worked the navigation case, triangulating by dead reckoning and radio beacon, his face illuminated by the green glow of the radar screen.

"Ten minutes to target zone," he said over the intercom. "But I cannot confirm. We are in cloud. Tom—bomb aimer—you are on your own."

Tom unbuckled himself from the navigator's seat and crawled forward into the bomb aimer's station, a glass-domed compartment at the nose of the aircraft that, in good weather, offered a perfect view of the ground below. In cloud, it offered nothing: a white nothing, a sealed eye looking out at an eye that had gone blind.

The Chesley was down. Gum and tape could only do so much in temperatures of minus thirty degrees. Tom stared into the glass dome and saw nothing. He heard Cole's voice: Hold position. Hold—

A burst of flak exploded to their left. The Lancaster shuddered. The instruments flickered. Tom's stomach dropped and then rose, caught between two forces that did not care which way he faced.

"Contact!" someone shouted over the intercom—tail gunner, spotting tracers in the darkness. "Port side, two thousand yards—enemy fighters!"

"Maintain formation," Cole said. His voice did not change. It was the voice of a man who had trained for this moment his entire life and had arrived at it exactly as expected.

Then the flak started.

It was not individual bursts but a wall—a continuous, roaring explosion that filled the sky like a curtain of fire. The Lancaster was hit twice in rapid succession. The right engine caught. Tom felt the aircraft lurch, tilt, spiral. Cole wrestled the controls. Brooks was thrown against the bulkhead. George screamed—not in pain, but in recognition, the sound of a man hearing his own name called by something he did not want to answer.

Tom was thrown forward into the glass dome. His forehead struck the frame. Blood ran down his face, warm and thick and useless. He could not see the ground. He could not see anything. But his hand was on the release mechanism, and the blind-bomb timer was counting down in his head because the electronic one had been destroyed by the flak:

Three.

He thought of Clara's piano, three sticky keys, playing Bach in a shelter below the tracks.

Two.

He thought of his father's prosthetic leg, standing by the fireplace in their Surrey house, waiting for a son who was currently falling through cloud over a country that did not want him there.

One.

He pressed the button.

The Lancaster shuddered as fourteen tons of explosives left the bay and fell away, downward, toward a target Tom could not see and might never have existed. They had dropped on residential buildings. Tom knew this years later, from German records. He knew this because records do not care whether you wanted to see them.

The aircraft went into a spin. Cole pulled the emergency release. One by one, the crew bailed out. Tom counted them as they went: Cole, Brooks, George (his good eye wide open, taking in the last thing he would ever see), Jimmy, and the three gunners, their parachutes opening like dark flowers in the night sky.

Tom's parachute opened at eight thousand feet—too low. It tore partially on deployment, the fabric rippling like a wounded bird. He fell the rest of the way into the North Sea, freezing, half-conscious, his leg shattered by the impact with water that was colder than any hospital could simulate.

He woke on a beach in East Anglia two days later, washed ashore by a tide that had carried him past the offshore bars and the fishing nets and the debris of a war that had taken everyone he knew except the man who had dragged him to land.

V.

V-E Day, May 1945. Tom sat in a pub in Shoreditch, a glass of whiskey on the table in front of him, and listened to the street outside where London was celebrating the end of the war in Europe. People were singing. Someone had set up a gramophone on a truck, and music poured through the open windows, bright and loud and completely incongruous with the man sitting in the corner of a dark pub with a shattered leg and eight hundred and forty-three ghosts sitting beside him.

A letter lay on the table next to his whiskey. He had not opened it yet. He knew what it said. He had imagined this letter for two years, in the spaces between sorties, in the hours after flak, in the silent moments when he floated above Germany and knew, with absolute certainty, that he was a man dropping fire on strangers from a height at which all lives looked identical.

He opened it.

Tom, it read. Tonight London is dancing in the streets. I played God Save the King on the piano from the ruins, but the strings broke. All of them at once, like nerves snapping. The people cheered anyway. They cheered even though the piano died. I think that is the point, Tom. The piano died and they cheered anyway. I thought of you. I don't know if you're coming back. I don't know if anyone from your squadron is coming back. But I played the piano anyway.

Your letters are in a drawer under my bed. I have read every one. I will never tell you which one I read the most.

The piano is broken, Tom. But I am still here. Are you?

Tom took the eighty-one letters from his coat pocket—letters he had written but never sent, descriptions of fire and cloud and the sound of engines in the dark, addressed to a woman who had kept them all and read them all and understood more of him than anyone else in the world ever would.

He tore the first letter in half. Then the halves in quarters. He dropped the pieces into his whiskey glass. The paper absorbed the amber liquid and began to dissolve, turning the whiskey grey, turning the clear into murk, turning something beautiful into something that could no longer be drunk, only observed.

Outside, the fireworks began—gold flowers blooming in the London sky, each one brilliant and brief and followed by absolute darkness. Tom watched them from the pub window, his face illuminated by the gold light, his eyes reflecting the burning, and thought:

Gold is a light that does not warm. It catches the eye and blinds the heart. We gather it in gilded rooms and call it victory.

He set the glass down. He did not finish the whiskey. He stood up, walked to the door, and stepped into the street, where people were dancing and singing and embracing strangers, and he stood among them—a man with a拐杖, a man with eighty-one dissolving letters, a man who had dropped fire on a city he could not see and would never visit—and he did not dance.

He stood still. And in a world that had decided, collectively, to celebrate, standing still was its own kind of survival.

Author Note & Copyright:

Author Note & Copyright: