Epilogue

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

~ Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae, Canadian Expeditionary Force, Died January 28, 1918

Edward lifted the nose of the Camel, peering over the fabric side at the spreading green of fields below. He glanced up to see Digory signaling him; then he saw.

It was the German Aerodrome, spreading gray in the green, steel huts crouching among the delicate structures of German fighters. A moment later, the first puff of ack-ack exploded below them, sending showers of hot shrapnel spraying through the air.

Digory dove sharply and Edward followed, engine whining. The strip of planes grew closer at a blinding speed and Edward jerked up his stick, releasing two of his bombs. He felt the shock wave of the explosion as he climbed and heard the rattle of shrapnel hitting the varnished linen of his fuselage.

The ack-ack was growing more accurate and Edward banked, trying to shake it off, but it followed him as tenaciously as a wild dog. He dropped his last two bombs on the hanger, then climbed, trying to get out of the range of the anti-aircraft guns. Edward fell in behind Digory again, glancing around for enemy fighters, but only saw the rolling pall of smoke that billowed over the aerodrome and the licks of flames that fed it.

The smoke seemed to be following them, rolling heavy, sunlight on gray. It looked like a bank of thunder clouds, darkly menacing, stretching out fingers to seize them. Edward scanned the sky, he knew as well as Digory that the Germans would be up and after them in a moment.

The Fokker Dr.I triplane seemed to burst from the smoke like a red dragon. It was completely scarlet, gleaming in the sunlight, black crosses on white. The German's wingman was a more sensible olive drab, with only one red wing.

First Digory, than Edward banked to meet them, engines screaming as they tried to gain altitude. Edward glanced with worry at his wings, the fabric wrinkled by the huge amount of stress laid upon them. It was not unknown for a fighter's wings to fly off in mid battle.

The scarlet Fokker passed overhead, machine guns spitting fire. The bullets passed clear through the wood and fabric fuselage, but guy wires popped and coiled, whipping more holes in the olive drab wings. Edward jerked the stick, desperately trying to maneuver in the German's turn, but the third wing on the Fokker made it fantastically agile, hopelessly outclassing the Camel in maneuverability.

Again, the red Fokker was above him, lining him up for a shot. Bullets pounded the fuselage, splintering the mahogany struts, the Camel disintegrating around Edward. Through the smoke, Edward heard his engine choke and sputter. Thick oil coated the windshield, his goggles, everything, until all he could see was a brown haze.

Desperately, he tried to wipe it away, but it only made it worse, he thought of taking them off, but knew that he would be blinded by the oil streaming from the engine. He couldn't tell if he was up or down and had a vague feeling that the Camel was diving. He pulled on the stick, trying to keep the Camel from nosing into a spin and again he tried to wipe the oil away.

Vaguely now he could see shapes through his goggles, magnificent shapes like giants towering around him. Then there was a rending crash and the Camel stopped dead, throwing him forward against the instrument panel. He heard the propeller shatter as it struck something hard and desperately he cut the engine.

In the silence that followed, he heard the panicked twittering of birds and the soft sound of wind in the leaves of a tree. With shaking hands, he pulled off his goggles, blinking in the sudden light. The limb of a tree had gone clear through the cockpit, littering the plywood floor with shredded leaves. Cautiously, he sat up and the plane shook alarmingly as if it were still airborne, then he looked over the side and saw, past the ripped off lower wing, the ground forty feet below him.

It took him a moment to realize that he'd crash-landed in the crown of an oak tree.

~o*o~

He'd crashed behind the British lines and for some time the soldiers would hike up to stare at the fighter stuck in the tree, until at last the mechanics dismantled it for parts.

Digory had done rather better than Edward. He'd nearly shot off the tail of one of the Fokkers, but hadn't been able to do much to the red one. He finally had been forced down when his fuel had at last given out. He'd made a landing in a poppy field and watched as the red Fokker made a pass. He could have sworn the pilot saluted him before banking away, back towards the smoke of the German aerodrome.

"I can't believe he forced me down so quickly, Diggs," Edward said, "He's good anyway."

"Well, he's not the Red Baron for nothing," Digory said.

The armistice was signed on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918 in the railroad car that General Foch's had made his headquarters. It would go into effect at the eleventh hour. Twenty-two years later, the French would surrender to the Germans in the very same car after a year of grueling fighting climaxing at Dunkirk.

The official peace was signed at Versailles and as the reflections of the dignitaries looked down in the hall of mirrors they signed the document, not of peace as they thought, but of war. They would learn the hard way that only God sets the boundaries of countries.

It was peace.

But the fighting did not stop. Wars raged from the day they were supposed to have ended. The Greeks and the Turks fought and when Smyrna burned in 1922 a hundred thousand Greeks and Armenians were massacred by the Turks. In Russia, millions vanished quietly into Siberian gulags never to be seen again.

Revolt followed revolt in the Middle East and in 1922 the Italians commenced on a ten year war to take Libya. Meanwhile, the Japanese moved into China and deaths of innocent civilians number in the millions. Ethiopians fought valiantly against the Italians with sticks and stones, but they too fell to the fascists. A million Indians fell to the clubs of their own countrymen when the British threw up their hands and finally withdrew, leaving India to herself. A civil war raged in Spain, Germans and Italians fought Mexicans and Russians in the field of battle, almost a miniature of what would happen later. A gruesome miniature.

Millions died in the years between the two great wars and there was not a single year of peace.

The War to end all wars, or the Peace to end all peace?

Yet in those years, in other parts of the world, war was mostly forgotten. The airplane suddenly became a new toy and all those old bi-winged veterans that had lasted the Great War met their deaths in the control of barnstorming pilots. Charles Lindberg flew the Atlantic in an airplane with no forward looking windows, only a periscope. A bomber named after the battle of Vimmy Ridge made the first flight from England to Australia. The world was slowly becoming smaller…but not small enough, Amilia Earhart went down in the Pacific and was never seen again. Airlines were starting up and in 1939 a flying boat could take seventeen people from England to Australia.

Over in the United States the Progressive Era slid grandly into a Great Depression and the Charleston was going out while the Jitterbug was coming in. It was a time when the average yearly income was only a thousand dollars and a new car cost eight hundred. The movie industry boomed; MGM burned down a whole lot to stage the burning of Atlanta in their four hour epic, Gone with the Wind, while the same year Wizard of Oz was a box office flop.

Edward Pevensie and Digory Kirke returned from their war not much worse for the wear. Digory had been injured in the leg earlier in the war and would always walk with a limp, but the tree, the daughter of the Tree of Protection that Digory had planted at his house in London fell in a storm and it was discovered that the root system had rotted away. Digory wired Edward: "Tree has fallen, good chance Narnia is down too. Can you make something from it? Reply paid."

The timber was put away in an attic in Digory's house in the Lake's District and it wasn't until the '20's that Edward traveled there to make it into something. Peter was only two at the time and only remembered as in a dream climbing over the boards and watching as his father joined the sides of the Wardrobe. The knobs, cast in the shape of a lion's head had to be sent away for and Digory suggested carving a flying horse on the panels and Edward obliged, though he always thought that his best carvings were on that other tree long ago.

They rarely saw each other after that.

Edward had gone back to school and was now at work as a doctor at Charing Cross Hospital and Digory traveled the world, immersing himself in the cultures and literature of other peoples.

He saw Venice beneath a marbled sky; he marveled at Michelangelo's David, he was in India during its 'bloodless' struggles for independence, he drank tea with a Bedouin in the Arabian Desert, he saw the place where Gordon fell in Khartoum. It was the battlefields that struck the deepest, the poppies on Flanders's Field that danced over the sleeping dead, Vimmy Ridge, Verdun, the white crosses stretching in dizzying symmetry, each symbolizing a man who had lived and died.

Edward sent him a letter in the mid '20's, asking him what he was searching for and Digory never replied. He couldn't reply, he didn't know. He was searching for answers but only seemed to find more questions. Somewhere in the back of his mind, as he sat on the banks of the Nar River, he thought of that other place, the world of which he had only had a few fleeting glimpses. Was he searching for that? He hardly knew.

Digory returned to England in 1929, worn and old, just in time to attend his mother's funeral. She had spent her last days in the house in London and as Digory followed his father into the shadowy front hall, the familiar smell of galoshes and old carpets sparked ancient and beautiful memories. A shaft of light from a misty window caught the corner of an old black book lying on a table and Digory reached out to pick it up.

These pages thumbed and worn by his father's hands, these words his mother's voice had said by candle light on winter nights; all these years it had been here waiting until the time had come that he should pick it up and see with widening eyes and quickening heart the answers to the questions of his soul.

He had searched the world with his questions, only to find that man has no answers, only God.

In the following years, Digory almost never left the study of the world's literatures, first at Magdalen College at Oxford, then Magdalene College, Cambridge. He taught new students, opening their eyes in a whole new way to the workings of the world.

But Germany, despite the Treaty of Versailles and the Washington Naval Treaty, was building up her air force and it was hinted that the largest battleship in the world was going to be launched. Then Von Hindenburg, the last holdout of sanity, died mysteriously and Adolf Hitler, the man who had finished the Great War a corporal, stepped into place. Slowly, inevitably, Germany began to annex her 'lost' territories of Austria and Czechoslovakia and Russia joined her and invaded Finland. But Poland was the last straw.

It was August of 1939 that Edward took up his pen to write, addressing his letter to the Lakes District where Digory was spending his summer translating Virgil and Horace.

"Hope this letter finds you well, old chap...the government has been organizing the evacuation of children out of the cities as their fairly sure that if there is war, London is going to be bombed and by more than just Zeppelins…They suggest we send our children to people we know…I was wondering if you wouldn't mind? Keep in mind there are four of them. Two boys, two girls… they're all well behaved, especially Susan, though you may find Edmund a bit of a trial…Please write soon."

Digory hadn't bothered to write, he'd sent a wire the same day he got the letter, "send them along as soon as possible."

They would enjoy his old house, he thought, the house built by his great uncle and filled with mounted lions, jade Buddhas and poison darts from Africa, he could tell them about his uncle's tea plantations in India and folktales from Russia and show them the petal-like tea set from China. He wasn't really old, at least not as old as he thought he was, but he had to admit that the day they arrived in the auto car and came up the steps to meet him, his heart was in his mouth in anticipation.

We search the world for truth; we cull

The good, the pure, the beautiful,

From graven stone and written scroll.

And all old flower-fields of the soul;

And, weary seekers of the best,

We come back laden from the quest,

To find that all the sages said

Is in the Book our mothers read.

~ John Greenleaf Whittier

The Beginning…

A/N: Sorry I deleted this chapter this morning, but it just wasn't finished. :)

It really was possible for biplanes to crash into trees and get stuck there. Things happened during the Great War, really peculiar things. A British pilot accidentally landed on an airship he was trying to shoot down and earlier on, before the fighters were armed with machine guns, the German and allied pilots would wave to each other when they flew past. That all ended when they started carrying rifles...and bricks...a German pilot managed to knock a French plane out of the sky by throwing bricks at it.

Anyway, hope you've enjoyed it.

~Psyche

PS: For some reason I was thinking of I See the Light from Tangled while I was writing this.