Cover of Darkness
Cover of Darkness. By Air Commodore Roderick Chisholm. (Chatto and Windus. 12s. 6d.) THIS is the muted odyssey of a " week-end flier." The author was a gifted leader among those fewer of the few to whom was entrusted the just-not-hopeless task of finding, and blunting, a sentient needle in the shapeless haystack of the midnight sky. He tells his story with all the restraint and deceptive calm of those radar-controlled night interceptions which he and his colleagues brought through disappointments and inspirations, heroism and meticulous care, to decisive victory. His colleagues in victory were spread far beyond the limits of the airfields ; the contributions from those who did not share directly in the supreme tests, the supreme skills and the supreme dangers of the night battle are all most fairly and most generously appreciated in this modest and objective personal fragment of world history.
There was an odd mixture of wisdom and of naïveté, an odd etymological juxtaposition, in the choice of the word" aircraftsman " to denote one of a basic class in the Royal Air Force. The author has it both ways ; he is at once an aircrafts-man and an air-craftsman. He was one of the indispensable links between the free-flanging skill and daring of the fighter pilot per se and .the minutely observing, stringently analytical and imaginatively synthesising skill of the scientific developer ; the linkage could only be achieved by those who shared both sets of qualities. Both are clearly visible in this story of the development of radio warfare, though the superficial reader may more easily see the air-craftsman than the aircrafts-man. The name of " Boffin "—now much abused by indiscriminate generalisation—is a title of honour conferred by a grateful Air Force on those " ground-jobs " who built into scientific equipment for the air an appreciation of the operational needs and limitations of air- fighting radar equipment, who left the small back room for the tarmac—and the cockpit—to ensure that they were matching the machine to the man. Air Commodore Chisholm understands and appreciates the boffin because he himself has boffin qualities which belong to the craftsmanship of wise experimental development. But Air Chief Marshal Sir William Elliot is none the less right when he says that this is " essentially a book about the air by an airman." In reading it, the urge to go back to Vol de Null and tor Pilote de Guerre was irresistible, and the contrast illuminating. It is fair, on the surface, to describe Cover of Darkness as a Vol de Nuit d'un Pilote de Guerre sans Exuperance, but the comparison goes far deeper, both in similarities and in profound contrasts. Both authors show that higher courage which is compact of fear without flinching, awareness without avoidance. Both are acutely sensitive to the beauty and the awe of loneliness in the empyrean. Yet, in their expression of both these uncommon qualities held in common, they illuminate the contrast between the calmly taciturn acceptance of the Briton and the clamorously ruminant reverberation of the French. Accept- ance, that is, of infinitely subtle, enduring beauties, and also of un- shakeable, improbable certainties ; reverberation of flamboyant natural beauty, but also of nation-destroying pessimism and spiritual vacua. There is of course vastly more in Saint-Exup6ry than this ; but there is also vastly more in Chisholm. In Saint-Exupery there is a paralysing pre-acceptance of the defeat of his nation, offset by a sustaining faith in the community of man within and beyond the nation. In Chisholm there is the calm systematic march along the accidented road of technical development, the careful but confident flight through a great darkness. These were characteristic of thg nation which was alone in the world—alone in the defence of that world ; alone also in its failure to share the world's conviction that it was a defeated nation. Not of Britain could it have been written as of France : Nous avons fulfil crever en Fratice de l'intelligence sans substance.
Every boffin would wish to say, to the distinguished member of the clan Chisholm who wrote this universally interesting book, how great was the privilege of fulfilling the old motto of the Buchanan, Audaces Juvo.
ROBERT WATSON-WATT
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