All Shall Be Well

I

How long does it take the fountain of blood from a decapitated human body to slow and then stop at an altitude of 28,000 feet, where the temperature is 40 degrees below zero? My father, who thought of becoming a physician but never did, learned the answer to this question. It was collateral learning. He completed 21 missions during World War II as a voice intercept operator, flying on U.S. Army Eighth Air Force bombers out of the county of Norfolk in England. My son, who is an emergency room physician, told me that he had never seen such a thing, although he suspected that the normal principles of coagulation would simply not apply under such circumstances. My son routinely sees a variety of trauma. Even so, I found it difficult to ask him to imagine a scenario so extreme.

In the year 1373, a woman we have come to know as Julian (or Juliana) of Norwich, also in the county of Norfolk, recorded an account of a religious vision she experienced. Referring to the third-century Roman martyr Saint Cecilia, she writes at one point, “I understood that she received three sword wounds in the neck from which she slowly and painfully died. Moved by this I conceived a great longing, praying our Lord God that he would grant me three wounds in my lifetime.” Julian’s three wounds are those of contrition for her own sins, compassion for others, and “an earnest longing for God.” The copilot on my father’s B-24 Liberator was beheaded by a 20mm cannon shell fired by a German fighter in a direct attack, a more efficient decapitation than that of Saint Cecilia, though lacking the metaphorical possibilities discovered by Julian.

In her bedridden vision of the crucified Christ, Dame Julian, as she was also known, “saw the red blood trickling down from under the crown of thorns, all hot, freshly, plentifully and vividly.” And: “I saw the blood coming from weals from the scourging, and in my vision it ran so abundantly that … if … it had been natural blood, the whole bed would have been blood-soaked and even the floor around.” Julian explains that blood, rather than water, is the medium with which to wash away sin, “for there is no liquid created which [God] likes to give us so much, for it is so plentiful and it shares our nature.” But I can only imagine the horror with which my father watched the human fountain in the cockpit. Julian was certain that she was going to die when she received her vision, and my father must have been sure that he would, too. I think he was an agnostic, though he was baptized and confirmed in the Episcopal Church at the age of 47, which suggests a belated and deliberate longing for God. I’m not sure he had ever heard of Julian of Norwich.

Dame Julian was granted her vision, and my father was granted his. I do not question her account, which exists in Middle and modern English (the lines above are quoted from Elizabeth Spearing’s translation). But what of my father’s vision? I do not remember that he ever spoke of it directly, and he never wrote it down. Yet apparently, he woke up screaming from nightmares for some years after the war, and my mother, who took a subversive delight in making fun of my father’s stiff upper lip, told me about those incidents. The thing is that my father was not an inventor of narratives. He did not have that aspect of imagination, though he enjoyed the stories of others. In the crowded split-level seating arrangement on a B-24, the pilot and copilot sat side by side on the cockpit flight deck. Behind them, sitting sideways, were the flight engineer and the radio operator. Below them, in the nose of the plane, were the navigator and the bombardier. If the copilot was killed in this way, how did my father and the other crew members survive to not tell the tale? The family narrative has always been very specific about the casualty of the copilot, though it is possible that a different crew member was beheaded. Presumably the pilot survived and somehow nursed the shattered plane back to the base. Such miracles did happen.

II

I am riding the Greater Anglia Rail from London’s Liverpool Street Station to Norwich. It occurs to me that the speed of the train, as it hurtles between hedgerows, may be approximately that of a B-24 at takeoff. By late 1944, more than 4,000 flights a day were taking off and landing at Norfolk airfields, and with this density of aircraft, collisions occurred: 1,458 B-24s were lost in action. By comparison, 1,079 German fighters were reportedly downed by American gunners in the Second Air Division in Norfolk. From the point of view of aircraft lost or flyers killed (the bombers had a crew of 10, the fighters often of one), this tradeoff does not seem worthwhile. Seven thousand Americans died.

But what does all this information matter? I arrive in Norwich, and the broken flint nodules mortared into the buildings and churches 800 years ago turn their sharp cloudy lenses toward me, like an electronic device that has not yet been awakened to gather information. The flints, thousands of them, must have watched Dame Julian 650 years ago, and they would have also looked at my father 80 years ago when, on leave from the bomber base at Old Buckenham, he walked the streets of Norwich in his trim Ike jacket with its new staff sergeant’s stripes, headed to the cinema with a friend.

The visionary lived in a hermit’s cell attached to the Church of Saint Julian, from which she took her name. It is said that Norwich had a church for every Sunday of the year and a pub for every day of the year, but Hitler’s so-called Baedeker raids of 1942 took care of that. Named after the celebrated guidebooks of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, these retaliatory attacks targeted cities listed in the books for their cultural or historical significance: Norwich, Bath, Canterbury, Exeter, and York. One of those attacks destroyed the church of Saint Julian, the hermit’s cell having been lost to the English Reformation long before. The Germans called these Terrorangriffe, or terror attacks, a phrase with which we are now quite familiar.

I am staying with friends in Norwich, and their apartment balcony looks out on the flint wall of an ancient and deconsecrated church now being used as a skateboarding center. From the shelf in my room, I pull down Vera Brittain’s book England’s Hour, chronicling the German Blitz on London in 1940. Brittain identified a crucial difference between the First World War and the Second:

The battle is less a struggle between men, than a conflict between methods of technical production, and a clash of machines directed by a small number of controlling minds. … The Front is everywhere, owing to the moral inability, shared by every Great Power, to refrain from the manufacture and use of the bombing aeroplane. … All the towns, villages and hamlets of every combatant country are potential battlefields.

The phrase “technical production” has a depersonalized, Walter Benjamin feel to it; but in articulating the concept of civilian war—of total war—Brittain is providing an early description of the terror attacks. And the idea of direction by “a small number of controlling minds” suggests both the bureaucratization of that total war and an abandonment of humankind, by the mind of God, to the ruthless cruelty of the human mind.