Men in the Air
THREE more books on a subject which some people (many pec` still consider one of the most immediately dramatic in the war the Air Forces in action. Two of them, The High Courl Heaven and Spitfire!, deal with the already much-written-1 Battle of Britain. The High Courts of Heaven casts the story, not fortunately, into the form of half-fiction, in that the group of young fighter-pilots, its chief protagonists, arc imaginary chara. the author claiming no more than that they " had real counter too numerous to mention." Undoubtedly true. They fight, they get killed. But the author has had odd lapses into making do it in the style of the Boy's Own Paper, and he has a sh bad ear for dialogue. The book has two good points: an tut (and true) sense of the strain—physical, mental, moral, nery keeping aircraft and aircrews in the air throughout weeks of tinuous emergency ; and the story's quiet ending on a nom dignified, unexpected and yet unforced tragedy. A curiously m book—its best good enough to bear no relationship whatever WI worst.
Spitfire ! is a strictly personal day-to-day record, during those days, of one crack fighter-pilot--completely authentic, if a monotonous in its long string of combat-successes. One would liked to hear a bit more about the Huns that he didn't get• there was no need to apologise, as he does, for "digressing," he turns for a short paragraph or two to speculating on such th as what a fighter-pilot will feel like after the war, with his occupy gone ; or why he was (or was not) sorry for a certain one of victims. These digressions are an integral part of the short. as are also his feelings on flying once again above Dunkirk the first day after the long days of the Dunkirk battle were ° " The wind was south-east and the smoke from Dunkirk stret right to London, a black ninety-mile trail! Over on the other there was no activity to be seen. A few derelict Thames bag sunken destroyer, an overturned lorry on the beach, such were only reminders of a conflict now over. Only the pall of smoke: The whole scene rather reminded me of a theatre after the a.udt has gone. Nothing to remind one of the show but the litter behind. Yes, the show was over now." Men of the R.A.F. is the most distinguished book of the though Sir William Rothenstein (when one remembers the drawings of the Will Rothenstein that was) seems only to have going at half-pressure. Apart from a few obviously picturesque that could not fail to catch his eye (Sir Charles Portal, Sir Fred Bowhill, a certain obscure Sergt. V. R. Stnith4and a few others
has made all his forty red-chalk portraits much of a muchness, as they certainly are not in real life. (The hands alone—always the test of a draughtsman's aliveness to his work—are here, though only suggested, all suggested as bits of the same suet-pudding.) But Lord Davil Cecil's contribution, a short twenty-page chapter, " A Layman's Glimpse," is the best and most sensitive thing that has been written about the R.A.F. A few stray visits to stations seem to be the author's only claim to knowledge, but the genuinely sensi- tive artist's eye has got it all—and got it at once. One cannot condense more than he has already condensed it—his brief artist's vision of the " secrecy " of the place, the intense inner life of an established operational station, its world-on-its-own, half-cloistered, and at least to some extent, as the author says, " dedicated." R.A.F. messes are chiefly known to the outside public for the parties that they give and the noise that they make. But parties take place on days when operations are scrubbed out, and noise itself can be a sign of release from tension. The writer has caught all the under- currents, and guessed at all the overtones. He has even got the outward casualness of the whole thing—and also its reverse " . . in the mess, at almost any hour of the day, one or two young men can be found lounging about, writing a letter or glancing at a paper. But soon one looks at his watch and silently goes out." On the whole, this is the best book on the subject that has yet been
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