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

that’s it,” he said. “I suppose they must know.”
    We did not say anything. Joe came along the bar, wiping the counter with the yellow duster. He looked at us and we looked at him. The foam had broken in the glasses and the beer looked flat and dead.
    â€œNow you will have this one with me, won’t you?” the young man said.
    We did not look at each other and we did not drink.
    We know when we have had enough.

The Disinherited
    On that station we had pilots from all over the world, so that the sound of the mess, as someone said, was like that of a Russian bazaar. They came from Holland and Poland, Belgium and Czechoslovakia, France and Norway. We had many French and they had with them brown and yellow men from the colonial empire who at dispersal on warm spring afternoons played strange games with pennies in the dry white dust on the edge of the perimeter. We had many Canadians and New Zealanders, Australians and Africans. There was a West Indian boy, the colour of milky coffee, who was a barrister, and a Lithuanian who played international football. There was a man from Indo-China and another from Tahiti. There was an American and a Swiss and there were Negroes, very black and curly, among the ground crews. We had men who had done everything and been everywhere, who had had everything and had lost it all. They had escaped across frontiers and over mountains and downthe river valleys of central Europe; they had come through Libya and Iran and Turkey and round the Cape; they had come through Spain and Portugal or nailed under the planks of little ships wherever a little ship could put safely to sea. They had things in common that men had nowhere else on earth, and you saw on their faces sometimes a look of sombre silence that could only have been the expression of recollected hatred. But among them all there was only one who had something which no one else had, and he was Capek the Czech. Capek had white hair.
    Capek was a night fighter pilot, so that mostly in the day-time you would find him in the hut at dispersal. The hut was very pleasant and there was a walnut piano and a radio and a miniature billiard table and easy chairs that had been presented by the mayor of the town. No one ever played the piano, but it was charming all the same. On the walls there were pictures, some in colour, of girls in their underwear and without any underwear at all, and rude remarks about pilots who forgot to check their guns. Pilots who had been flying at night lay on the camp beds, sleeping a little, their eyes puffed, using their flying-jackets as pillows; or they played cards and groused and talked shop among themselves. They were bored because they were flying too much. They argued about the merits of a four-cannon job as opposed to those of a single gun that fired through the air-screw. They argued about the climate of New Zealand, whether it could be compared with the climate of England. They were restless and temperamental, as fighter pilots are apt to be, and it seemedalways as if they would have been happier doing anything but the things they were doing.
    Capek alone was not like this. He did not seem bored or irritable or rotten or temperamental. He did not play billiards and he did not seem interested in the bodies of the girls on the walls. He was never asleep on the beds. He never played cards or argued about the merits of this or that. It seemed sometimes as if he did not belong to us. He sat apart from us, and with his white hair, cultured brown face, clean fine lips, and the dark spectacles he wore sometimes against the bright spring sunlight, he looked sometimes like a middle-aged provincial professor who had come to take a cure at a health resort in the sun. Seeing him in the street, the bus, the train, or the tram, you would never have guessed that he could fly. You would never have guessed that in order to be one of us, to fly with us and fight with us, Capek had come half across the