Authors: Christopher Priest
I could not in reality make her disappear, and I certainly had no idea how I could make one of the Royal Navy’s observer aircraft invisible.
My mood became increasingly introspective, a feeling I knew was familiar to other magicians. Sometimes we are credited with greater powers than we have. Usually, the misconception is something that
can be explained away, or treated without seriousness, but I was getting into hot water.
After what felt like a long drive along the uneven road, more or less doubling back over the way the train had travelled, Lieutenant Bartlett suddenly slowed the van down, turned the steering wheel sharply and drove with a violent lurching motion across rough ground. Low buildings lay ahead, picked out fitfully by our light. After another turning lunge we came to an abrupt halt and the engine died.
‘Here we are at last,’ Bartlett said. ‘Royal Naval Air Service Squadron No.17 – or as we call it,
La rue des bêtes
.’
‘Why do you call it that?’
‘We’ve taken over a tract of farmland. What’s now our landing strip used to be a place where cows grazed. It was someone’s joke at first. The farmer wasn’t in the habit of closing gates so the cows sometimes wandered back when we were landing or taking off, but since then it’s become semi-official. And we’ve fixed the gates.’
We went to the back of the van and pulled out my two bags. I stretched my arms and back, sucking in the calm air. After the din from the engine I relished the quietness of the night. We had travelled far enough to the west, away from the lines, for the flashes in the night to be distant, unthreatening. The display was like the last flickering glimpse of a storm as it moved away out to sea. The sound of the guns rumbled on but the horrors of war remained distant.
‘You won’t get to see much of the base tonight, sir,’ Lieutenant Bartlett said. ‘But let’s find you a berth, somewhere to sleep, and then we can grab a meal. At least the wine here is good. I’ll show you around the airfield tomorrow.’
The night was cold and bright with stars. I followed the young officer towards the smaller of the two buildings, only just visible in the dark.
I WAS BILLETED IN A ROOM ALONE. THERE WAS A NARROW
single bunk, a small cupboard beside the bed, a wooden chair squeezed in between the bed and the wall and a few hooks where I could hang my clothes. The ceiling sloped down sharply over the bed, as my room was at the end of the hut. Once I had dragged my two cases into the room I could barely move. I re-packed as well as I could, moving everything I thought I would not need immediately
to the larger of the two, then, after emptying the smaller case and hanging up some of the clothes, putting out my toothbrush, and so on, I managed to squeeze the larger case out of the way under the bed. The room was unheated so I undressed quickly and crawled into bed.
My mind was racing with memories of everything I had seen and experienced, and especially with my conversation with H.G. Wells. I was dog-tired after the day, though, and although I was cold and uncomfortable I fell asleep almost at once.
I awoke while it was still dark. After the first moments of confusion about where I was I felt nervous, in danger, frightened. Everything around me was unseen and silent, and although I quickly remembered where I was, and how I had got there, I felt terrified of the unknown.
All through my life I have suffered these night fears. I know I am not alone, that psychological experts have described the pre-dawn period as the time when the intellect and emotions are at their lowest ebb. Fears and regrets come easily and quickly, seem real and immediate and awful. They retreat somewhat when the new day dawns, becoming easier to bear, but all that changes is the context. Fears in the night are not imaginary or exaggerated, they are merely at the forefront of your mind.
There I was in rural northern France, alone in a mean room, lying on a bed with inadequate covers, in the dark, a war in progress a few miles away. I remembered what Simeon Bartlett had said about the giant Krupp cannon. Was it real? Would they really target bases like this one before turning it on Paris? I also remembered what H.G. Wells had prophetically written about the power and influence of the Krupp company. I was wide awake and completely at the mercy of my fears. I turned over twice, trying to relax, trying to slip back into that blissful sleep, but it proved impossible.
I sat up, plumped the pillow, lay down again. Many thoughts were circling, all of them painful. My conversation with H.G. Wells – I realized that he must have found me dull and politically naïve, and had only spoken to me at all because there was no one else around. I recalled the haste with which he was so keen to leave me at Béthune station. I should have talked more intently to the famous author about his books. I should have shown some interest in the subjects which were his passion. Instead, I showed this brilliant man, a confidant of people like Winston Churchill, how to shuffle a deck of cards and make a cigarette disappear. What a fool he must
have thought me. Then there was the lance-corporal – I had taken his good nature for granted, but said nothing as a compliment, or thanks. And how seriously I had taken Lieutenant Bartlett’s little joke about the road of beasts!
Worst of all, there was his misunderstanding about what my supposed magical powers were.
I concealed my young niece by the use of conjuring techniques, but Lieutenant Bartlett thought I could make her actually and really invisible. Would that I had that or any other power! My niece does not become invisible – to think otherwise is madness, yet at every performance, with a planned use of well-positioned lights, a strategically placed sheet of glass, a bang from a gun that fires blanks, and general hocus-pocus, I can make it seem that way.
I mislead and deceive. That is what I do.
Squatting uncomfortably in the cold and narrow bunk I remembered the wave of spurious patriotism and gallantry that swept over me that evening at the theatre in Hammersmith, when Lieutenant Bartlett found his way backstage. I suddenly saw myself as making a contribution to the struggle against Germany, using my skills to amaze and encourage the brave young men who were doing the fighting.
That was my misunderstanding, perhaps the lesser of the two. The reality of the war was becoming all too clear. My misunderstanding ended there, in that bed, while I tossed and turned, waiting for the day to start.
But then there was the larger misconception. I was going to have to do something!
Surely Lieutenant Bartlett must have understood the true nature of my work? A concealment from the audience was relatively easy to contrive in the controlled circumstances of a theatre stage, where the performer knows how to dazzle or confuse or obstruct. The sordid reality of war, with real aircraft, real guns, real shellfire, young men risking their lives every day – an impossible challenge.
I tried to be calm. The room was bare, cold, inhospitable. It had the feeling of a barrack room, of temporary occupation by others who had used it before me. What had become of them? In the return to darkness I could at least put those unwelcome thoughts aside. I saw at the small window that there was now a faint greyness in the sky as dawn approached. I made myself breathe calmly, a relaxation technique I sometimes employed before going on stage. Still my mind turned restlessly.
I remembered HG’s stories about his Kipps-style experiences when he was a youth. Years afterwards, when he was no longer a disaffected sales clerk on starvation wages, he had seen the potential, writ large, of the telpherage system that was still in use in many British emporia. As an author, H.G. Wells had always inspired me – could my meeting with him now prompt me to conceive of thrilling new possibilities?
I began to wonder if there was something I might know about magic that could provide Lieutenant Bartlett with the camouflage he wanted. I forced myself to think practically about the techniques I took for granted.
Many times in my stage career I have had to think up some new trick for my act. I sit at home, sometimes in a semi-darkened room, planning how to pull it off, thinking about how I want it to appear when on stage, and working out what material or apparatus I might need. Sometimes I would chat obliquely to other magicians – never was anything directly said, because in my profession secrecy is everything, as is respect for the secrets of others. But it always helped to talk over the general principles, without giving away too much about what I was planning. The principles of magic are much simpler than most people think – concealment, production, and so on. They apply to every illusion ever performed. What often looks like a new trick to the audience is a variation on one of these principles: a new way of performing a familiar card trick, a surprise production of a dove or a rabbit, a modified cabinet inside which my compliant niece would seem to be transformed.
Here in France they wanted me to make an entire aircraft invisible, to try to protect the young airmen flying it, to help them elude the enemy, to make the prosecution of the war more effective. Was that possible?
Fighting back my fears of inadequacy, I went through the possibilities. The most obvious, and probably the cheapest and simplest, would be to change the colour or appearance of the aircraft so that it merged with the sky in some way. Paint it silver or pale blue?
Would it work? My experience suggested it probably would not. A few years earlier I had tried to design a new and, I thought, clever way of creating a disappearance on stage. I persuaded my then assistant to wear a costume that was made in the same colour, and of the same material, as the curtain backdrop. It turned out to be one of those ideas that are better in theory than practice. No matter what I tried, with movements or lights, she remained as visible to the audience as she would have been dressed all in white, or black, or indeed normally.
What if it was applied to an aircraft, though? I tried to imagine how a camouflaged plane might look while it was overhead. Like most people I had not seen many aircraft close to, although I did go to an exhibition flight by the famous French aviator, Louis Blériot. At one point in his display he zoomed slowly and blackly over the heads of the spectators.
Blackly
– that is the key word. On that sunny day on the South Downs near Brighton, his fragile little machine looked from our position below like a dark bird of prey. But if it had been painted the same colour as the sky? Would we have seen it then?
Assuming it was possible to find the right shade or tone of a silvery blue, and assuming the sky was bright, with high cloud coverage… what then? I closed my eyes, trying to visualize the result.
Doubts arose almost at once. An aircraft is not a smoothly contoured object. It has wings and an engine and struts and wires and wheels below and a pilot and observer sitting in their cockpits above. It also carries identifying marks.
Under certain highly controlled circumstances, and with ideal sky conditions, it might be possible to contrive that a warplane was less noticeable. It would only work if the plane remained in the right environment: it might become indistinct when crossing the glowing sky, but how would it look from the side, or from above? How would it blend in against a background of trees, grass, concrete, mud?
Flying in the air was a far from ideal circumstance. The aircraft would dodge and weave, its propeller would spin, the engine would make a racket and, no doubt, a trail of exhaust smoke would follow it.
Skies are bright. Paint is a medium that reflects light – the sky is a source of illumination. If my camouflaged plane were to fly between the enemy and a brilliant sky, the aircraft would show up as a black silhouette, just as Monsieur Blériot’s had. It was an object that would block light, not reflect it. And, as contrary case, what if the sky were not bright, but a lowering cloud base presaging rain? What if my pilot, departing on a daytime sortie in a bright blue-and-silver craft, was forced to return in a gathering dusk?
My mind first shied away from these thoughts, then re-circled around them.
I knew only a little about the science of camouflage and wished I had had the wit to learn more about it before I left London. I did know why the British Army clad its soldiers in khaki – that was an inheritance from the Mutiny in India. Then the troops’ fighting gear had been dyed a dull yellow-brown colour, so that their uniforms
would tend to merge with the dusty landscape. Until then it was the custom of armies to kit out their soldiers in bright primary colours, reds and blues and whites – this was partly to impress and intimidate the foe, but also to allow easy recognition for troops on the same side. That had to change in the Indian campaign. It was a mobile, unstructured war that put a formal army at a disadvantage. There the British had an enemy who ran and hid, and laid traps, who melted into the back streets when chased, who knew the terrain intimately and used it unscrupulously. The khaki fatigues were an attempt to fight back on something like the same terms.
I had heard that a new kind of camouflage was being used experimentally on ships: it was a painted design that did not attempt to hide the ship, or make it blend into the background, but which used dazzle techniques. This made it difficult for an enemy to determine in which direction the target might be heading. British merchantmen had been attacked by German submarines from almost the first days of the war. The U-boats scanned their targets and took aim from beneath the surface, using the periscope. When the bulky optical gear broke the surface, a sharp-eyed lookout on a British escort warship might quickly spot the presence of a submarine, so the German raiders could only raise it for a few seconds at a time. The idea of the dazzle was that the asymmetrical outline would confuse the U-boat captain when aiming his torpedoes.
It appeared to be a successful tactic, because the tonnage of lost ships had been significantly reduced since the dazzle paint was introduced. It gave me a few thoughts, a few ideas, a possible way of trying that technique with the British observer aircraft.
One of the classic disappearance techniques used by illusionists is placing a carefully angled mirror between the object that is to vanish and the audience looking at it. For example, a mirror placed beneath a four-legged table along the cross diagonal will not only give the illusion that the table is just like every other table (that is, supported on all four legs, one in each corner), but will create a space behind it within which something, or someone, may easily be concealed.