Our preparation suddenly seems to me alarmingly casual: I have brought a couple of Michelin road maps, and Anthony has an air navigation chart covered with purple stripes that are restricted areas and circles that are radio beacons. But here we are, turning into the wind and cleared for takeoff. We had talked about such a flight off and on for a long time - where we’d go, and what we’d see - but in the idle way that friends do, over a drink or a meal, not really expecting that it will happen. I feel a certain astonishment that we have actually managed to get the project this far, and I half expect something to go wrong, even now. Flying over the town decades later, Princeton professor emeritus Samuel Hynes, a World War II pilot, found that from 1,500 feet, the town appeared “as it must always have looked.” Only the Menin Gate, England’s memorial to the missing dead, “makes the war present.” German shelling ruined the old town of Ypres, Belgium (above), in World War I. The plane is a Piper Warrior - about as fast as a Sopwith Camel or a Fokker triplane, though a good deal more comfortable.
Anthony is with me because he loves to fly, likes France, and is better at navigation than I am. It’s high time that I saw the actual landscape of the Great War, since I’ve just written a book about it and because I was once a military pilot, it seems right that I should see it from the air. We are setting out, my friend Anthony Preston and I, to fly the length of the Western Front from Ypres to Verdun. Visibility over northern France will be good. It is a fine English October morning - bright sun, the sky intensely blue, with thin streaks of high cirrus clouds in the west and a mild wind blowing from the south. The weather is with us, I think as we taxi out to the runway. 13 / 10:15 A.M.: Shoreham Airport, Sussex. In the essay, Hynes describes a flight over European battlefields that he made with a friend in October 1990. Following is an excerpt from that collection it was originally published in the Summer 1992 issue of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. Hynes often has drawn on his own experience, as he did in essays in his most recent collection, On War and Writing, published this year by the University of Chicago Press. Six of his 11 books address the subject of war. Hynes, the Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature, emeritus, was a Marine Corps pilot in the Pacific Theater during World War II. Soldiers have been saying since ancient times that it’s impossible to describe the experience of war to those who have not been through it, but Samuel Hynes has spent much of his career trying, almost singlehandedly pioneering war writing as a genre for academic study.
0 kommentar(er)
