Trail

by Alexander Friedmann, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The agent's report came in on Thursday, folded small, in the hand of the staff clerk who copied out such things for the detachment. It said that the four bombs dropped on the station at the junction on the Monday had fallen in an orchard on the far side of the line, three hundred paces beyond the goods shed. One tree destroyed. One horse belonging to a carter killed. The station undamaged; traffic not interrupted.

Staff-Captain Mamontov read it aloud in the mess hut, standing by the stove with his boots steaming, and the pilots laughed, and he laughed with them.

"The horse was a reservist," somebody said.

"The horse was an Austrian," said Mamontov. "Let us not be sentimental." He folded the paper and put it in his tunic. "They go where God sends them. Next week God will be more attentive."

Ensign Tikhomirov had been with the detachment eleven days. He was sitting at the end of the table with a mug of tea he had not drunk, and he did not laugh, and Mamontov saw that he did not.

"You have an opinion, Gleb Sergeyevich."

"Three hundred paces," Tikhomirov said. "That is about two hundred and twenty metres. That's not God. That's the speed of the machine."

---

He worked it out that night in the hut he shared with the photographer, by a lamp with a cracked chimney that smoked if the wick went above the line. He had a slide rule, a table of squares, the map sheet for the junction, and the back of a requisition form, because there was no other paper.

He began with the thing the pilots would not have: that a bomb let go from an aeroplane does not fall straight down. It leaves the machine moving forward at the machine's own speed, and it keeps that speed, nearly, all the way to the ground. Nobody who has thrown a stone from a cart would doubt it. But the pilots did not throw stones from carts; they let go when the target passed under the lower wing, and that was the end of the matter.

How long does it fall? From twelve hundred metres, without air, the square root of twice the height over g: about fifteen and a half seconds. And in fifteen and a half seconds a machine making seventy-five kilometres an hour over the ground goes three hundred and twenty metres. The agent had counted his three hundred paces from the goods shed, which was not quite where anyone had aimed. It was near enough.

The air takes some of it back. The bomb is slowed by the air it falls through, and lags behind the machine, so that at the moment of impact the aeroplane is not over the burst but a little beyond it. He did not know how much. There were French figures for French bombs; there were none that he had seen for a Russian pood bomb, finned, sixteen kilograms. He reasoned from its weight and its cross-section and arrived at something between twenty and sixty metres, and wrote down forty, and drew a box around the forty, because it was the weakest number on the form.

Then the height. The aneroid on the dashboard was set to zero on the field. But the field stood on a terrace above the river, and the junction lay in the valley on the other side of the ridge; by the contours on the map sheet, eighty metres lower. A machine reading twelve hundred over the junction was twelve hundred and eighty above the rails. He put that in.

And the ground speed. That was the one that moved. The machine made a hundred kilometres an hour through the air, more or less, depending on the engine and the load. But the air was itself going somewhere, faster or slower at every height, from morning to morning. The only way to know the speed over the ground was to measure it over the ground, in the air, on the run.

He did it with angles. Two sights, fixed to the side of the nacelle: one pointing forward and down at forty-five degrees from the vertical, one at twenty. A crossroads, a church, anything that would pass along the line of the run, would come into the first sight, and some seconds later into the second. Between the two sights, at twelve hundred and eighty metres, lay eight hundred and fourteen metres of ground. Divide by the seconds. Then the fall time, the forward travel, less the forty for the air, and the angle at which to let go: the arctangent of the distance over the height.

He made a card, ruled in ink, with a column for the seconds between sights and a column for the release angle, from thirty seconds to sixty. At four in the morning he went to bed. The photographer was snoring. The card lay on the table with the slide rule on it to keep it flat.

---

"You're asking me," said Mamontov, "to fly in a straight line over their guns for a minute and a half."

"Forty seconds between the sights. Then I set the release, and perhaps forty more to the angle. Then sixteen while they fall, but you can turn the moment they go."

"Eighty seconds, then. Straight."

"And level. And at the same speed. And at twelve hundred on the aneroid, not eleven hundred and not thirteen."

"And not drifting, I suppose."

"Into the wind," said Tikhomirov. "If we run straight into the wind there's no drift. And a slower ground speed is better. More time to sight."

Mamontov looked at the card for a while. He was a heavy man of about forty, who had been in the dragoons and had learned to fly at Gatchina two years before the war, at his own expense. He had a red, clever face and he was not a fool. He handed the card back.

"Lyosha threw them by hand," he said. "My last observer. I would shout, and he would heave them over one at a time. He had a good arm."

"That's a second between the first and the last. At twenty metres a second."

"Twenty metres," said Mamontov. "I see."

The mechanic, Zhurba, built the rack that afternoon out of the iron frame of a bed from the manor house where the officers were quartered. It was a cradle that hung outside the nacelle on the observer's side, under his left hand, with four hooks on a common bar; one lever, and the bar turned, and the four bombs went together. Zhurba tried it on the ground with sandbags. The sandbags fell into the grass with a single soft sound. He tried it four times, and then he spat on the lever for luck and wiped it with his sleeve.

The sights Tikhomirov made himself: two brass curtain rings soldered to strips of tin, with a cross of fine wire in each, clamped to the coaming at forty-five degrees and twenty by a protractor and a plumb line, with the machine trestled level on the field. The third, the release sight, was a ring on a pivot, with a pointer moving over a quadrant scratched in the tin with a nail, one degree to each mark.

Along the floor of the nacelle, through the gap at his feet, he ran a wire from front to back, on the centre line. If the ground slid along the wire, they were not drifting. If it slid across it, they were.

---

They took off at a quarter past six, with the sun just up and a light wind from the west. On the climb the cold came through his coat at once, and through the two jerseys under it, and he wished he had a third. The engine roared behind them. The air off the propeller smelled of castor oil and hot water. In front of him Mamontov's back was broad and still in its leather, and the speed indicator on the strut showed ninety-five, a hundred, ninety-five.

At twelve hundred they crossed the river. The ridge went under them, the dark woods on its spine, and the valley opened beyond it with the town at the near end, the white church, the long roofs of the station, the iron thread of the line running east along the water meadows. There was mist still in the bottom of the valley. It lay over the river like milk in a dish.

Tikhomirov tapped Mamontov on the shoulder and pointed down, and Mamontov looked over the side and nodded. They went out past the town, three kilometres east, and turned, and came back towards it with the low sun behind them, into the wind.

He bent over the wire. The fields went along it, slowly, a little crooked. He made a sign with his hand, a little to the left, and Mamontov put on a touch of rudder and held it, and the fields ran straight along the wire. They were flying with the nose a few degrees to the left of their path, crabbing, and the path itself lay along the wire and along the line and on to the station.

The first burst came at that moment. It was well ahead of them and a hundred metres below, a ball of grey-white smoke that appeared without any sound he could hear over the engine, and then grew, and then began to come apart. Another came above it, to the right. Mamontov did not move.

There was a crossroads on the line of the run, six hundred metres short of the west end of the station, with a wayside cross where the roads met. Tikhomirov had chosen it from the map the night before. He put his eye to the forty-five-degree sight and waited, the stopwatch in his right hand, his thumb on the crown.

The burst on the right was closer now. He heard this one, a flat crack, and something rattled on the lower wing like a handful of gravel thrown on a roof. The crossroads came up into the ring. The wayside cross touched the wire.

He pressed.

He moved his head to the second sight. The roads came towards the ring at the speed of a man walking, a very old man walking. He did not look at the smoke. He did not look at Mamontov. He watched the crossroads come, with the white dust of the two roads crossing in the green, and he counted nothing, because the watch was counting, and the cross came into the second ring and touched the wire, and he pressed.

Thirty-nine seconds.

He did not need the slide rule. He had the card. Thirty-nine: twenty point nine metres a second over the ground. Release angle, thirteen degrees and one tenth. He set the pointer on the quadrant between the thirteenth mark and the fourteenth, nearer the thirteenth, and put his eye to the release sight, and the station was beyond it, coming towards it.

A burst under them now. The machine lifted under him, and dropped, and the aneroid needle on Mamontov's board swung up to twelve hundred and fifty and came back; Mamontov had felt it, and put the nose down a hair and brought it back. Twelve hundred. A hundred on the speed. The ground ran along the wire.

He had chosen the points as his mark: the set of points at the west end of the yard, where the two sidings left the main line beside the water tower. There was a train standing on the farther siding, a long one, goods wagons, perhaps thirty, with an engine at the east end making smoke. Along its side, between the wagons and the platform, there were small dark particles moving, like poppy seed spilled on a cloth and shaken. He could not see what they were. At twelve hundred and eighty metres a man is a minute of arc across, at the very limit of the eye.

The water tower came into the ring. The points came to the wire.

He pulled the lever.

The machine jumped, sixty-five kilograms lighter, and Mamontov held it. Tikhomirov leaned out over the side, his face in the wind, and watched the bombs go. For the first seconds he could see them, four black marks in a row, falling away beneath and behind the nose, keeping pace with the machine, not falling behind; and then he lost them against the ground. He did not count. He looked at the points.

The points slid towards him and under the nose and passed beneath; he twisted to keep them in view. Mamontov was beginning the turn, the left wing going down, and the valley swung up into his face.

Four bursts, very nearly at once, in a line along the farther siding. Then the sound, much smaller than he had expected, a dull double knock that came up through the engine noise like a door slammed in another house. Brown smoke. Earth thrown up in the air and coming down. A wagon on its side. A second wagon, and from its open door something white that went up in a column and hung, flour or lime. The engine at the east end went on making smoke.

The particles beside the train were not moving now. Some of them were moving very fast away from the train, out across the meadow towards the river, and some of them were not moving at all.

He looked at the points. The bursts lay beyond them, among the wagons; he counted wagons from the points to the first crater. One, and part of the next. Fifteen metres, perhaps. Twenty at most.

Mamontov turned his head and shouted something that the engine took away. Then he turned again to face forward and put the machine round towards the ridge and the river and home, and a last burst of shrapnel opened behind them, too high, too late.

---

They landed at five past seven. Zhurba came running across the grass before the propeller had stopped, and when he saw the empty cradle he took his cap off and put it on again.

Mamontov climbed down and stood beside the machine, pulling his gloves off one finger at a time. There were three holes in the fabric of the lower wing, small and round, with the threads standing out from the edges. He put a finger through one of them. Then he walked round to the observer's side, where Tikhomirov was still sitting with the card on his knee and his pencil in his hand.

"Well?" said Mamontov.

"Long. Fifteen to twenty metres."

"Long." Mamontov looked at him. "You put four bombs on a train standing in a station from twelve hundred metres, and you say long."

"The air," Tikhomirov said. "I allowed forty for the air. It's less. Twenty-five, perhaps, for this bomb." He showed him the box drawn round the forty. "That was the guess. Everything else was measured. It's the only number that was wrong, and it's wrong by fifteen metres, so it's twenty-five, near enough. It'll be closer next time."

Mamontov said nothing. He stood with his gloves in one hand and slapped them, gently, against the other, and looked at the card, and then away across the field at the line of the woods where the river was. A lark was going up over the grass, singing, very high.

"Make copies," he said at last. "One for each crew. Tonight."

He went off towards the huts.

Tikhomirov sat in the nacelle with the engine ticking as it cooled behind him. His hands were stiff and he flexed them. Then he put the card on the coaming, and struck through the forty in its box with one straight line, and wrote twenty-five above it, small and clear, and began, from the top of the column, thirty seconds, to work the angles out again.

---

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem ūndecimum Kalendās Novembrēs (22 October 2026), ab Alexandrō Friedmannō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Alexander Friedmann, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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