Fair Stood the Wind for France [antikvár]

CHAPTER 1 Sometimes the Alps lying below in the moonlight had the appearance of crisp folds of crumpled cloth. The glacial valleys were alternately shadowy and white as starch in the blank glare of the full moon; and then in the distances, in all directions, as far as it was possible to see, the high snow peaks were fluid and glistening as crests of misty water. Somewhere below, in peacetime, at Domo d'ossola. Franklin remembered he had once waited for a train for England. He held the mouthpiece of the intercomm. to his mouth, dry now after ail the hours of flying across France, across the Alps, and into Italy and called his crew. 'All set for France,' he said. 'Any complaints?' 'Home is where I long to be,' the sergeant rear-gunner said, 'before I bust with boredom. What year is it?' 'We're Hannibal crossing the Alps,' Sandy said. 'The year is 218 b.c.' 'It could be,' Godwin said. 'It's all right for Connie. He just sits and plays patience.' 'Patience hell,' O'Connor said. 'I'm dying of excitement now.' Franklin listened rather dully, his mind flat with strain, to the talk of the crew. It was August and the papers were beginning to use once again, with slight agitation, the word offensive. It did not mean very much to him. All through the winter the offensive had been mounted against Germany and had gone on, with some breaks in the late winter because of weather, into the third summer of the war. The New Year had come in again, as it had done the previous year and the year before that, with snow, and the spring had followed with bitter dry winds in May. There had been much east wind and sometimes that summer, with things going wrong again in Egypt and the summer seeming as if it would never come, people everywhere had seemed ill-tempered. Now with what the newspapers called the rising tide of war he could feel in himself, delayed and arid, his own impatience at the war. If he kept flying until October he would 5