The Complete Flying Officer X Stories by H.E. Bates Page B

and looked through the glass door of the anteroom.
    â€œYou can tell by their faces, sir,” she said.
    I turned and looked too. In the morning we should read about it in the papers; we should hear the flat bulletins; we should see the pictures. But now we were lookingat something that could be read nowhere except in their eyes and expressed in no language but their own.
    â€œPretty good show,” I said.
    â€œYes, sir,” she said. “No trouble at all.”

A Personal War
    He is a little fellow with an oval head that is quite bald except for a few feathery wisps of grey hair. He has a small tobacco-gold moustache and sharp blue eyes and a way of bowing slightly when he speaks to you, as if he were nothing but the receptionist of a hotel, or a cashier at a bank, or a travelling salesman in toys.
    It is not until you look at his hands that you realise that they are not the hands of a man who assigns rooms to guests or counts money or winds up the keys of little engines. They are very short and thick and powerful hands and the fingertips protrude unusually far beyond the small tight nails. Then after you have looked at his hands, which are so small yet so muscular and aggressive, you look back at his face, and you see then that the little stiff moustache and the sharp blue eyes and even the bald grey head are aggressive too, and that even the short and charming bow has another meaning. After talking to him for a little while you realise what this meaning is. He is a traveller in a Stirling, and his toys are guns.
    We sit talking for a long time before he tells me this. It is winter and at the moment there are no operations. Still grey mists hang far over the flat land, and pools of yellow mud cover the track along which the bombers are lined up. It has been raining for a long time and there is no wind to drive the mist away.
    Suddenly, for no reason, he talks of America.
    â€œYou have been there?” I say.
    â€œFor a long time,” he says. “I was born here, but mostly I have lived there.”
    â€œWhere?”
    â€œIn Texas mostly.”
    â€œWhich is why they call you Tex?”
    â€œWhich is why they call me Tex,” he says, with a smile.
    â€œAnd how,” I say, “do you feel about America?”
    â€œAmerica or Americans?”
    â€œAmericans.”
    â€œWhich Americans?” he says.
    We both laugh. I look out of the window and watch for a moment the rain dripping down through the mist on the huge iron-coloured wings of the Stirlings, and when I look back at him again, I see that he has stopped laughing and is serious again.
    â€œYou think they don’t understand?” I say.
    â€œNot only that.”
    â€œWhat else?”
    â€œIt’s not only time they understood,” he says, “it’s time they got angry. It’s time they got good and angry too.”
    â€œLike you?”
    â€œA bit more like me,” he says.
    He smiles and we sit without talking for a little while and I watch his hands. He has a way of crooking the fingers of his right hand into the fingers of the left, and then pulling them, as if they were triggers. Finally I ask him if he will have a drink, and with a charming smile but without uncrooking his hands he says: “Possibly. Thank you. Possibly I will. It is very kind of you. Thank you.”
    â€œWhat will it be?”
    â€œThank you,” he says, “a beer.”
    When the beer comes I ask him what it is like up there in the rear turret on ops. — if he gets bored or tired or very cold; and he says: “No. Only just angry. Very good and angry all the time.” I listen and soon he goes on to tell me about the flak: how it seems to come up slowly, very slowly, as if it will never climb into the darkness.
    â€œVery bad too?”
    â€œNot at all polite,” he says.
    â€œAnd in Texas,” I say — “what were you doing there?”
    â€œSheriff.”
    â€œGun and