DY Header CLOSE WINDOW

Flags in the Dust
Manuscript, page 02. Transcription follows image.
Page 02, Flags in the Dust Ms
William Faulkner Foundation Collection, 1918-1959, Accession #6074 to 6074-d, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections,
University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.   [Item Metadata: [SARTORIS] FLAGS IN THE DUST. Autograph manuscript. 237 p. (236 R, 1 V) on 236 l. Slipcase.]
TRANSCRIPTION

Bayard and Evelyn Sartoris were twins, and between them was the nearest thing to affection there had ever been
between Sartoris men. They passed inseparably and to the scholastic detriment of both, through preparatory
school; whereupon it was deemed best to separate them in college. So Bayard, the older, went to Virginia
and Evelyn to Princeton in the same year. Their holidays and vacations they spent together; and New York
policemen came to know them during week-ends and to wish them dead.

At the end of their junior year they were 23, and in June of 1916 they got themselves shipped as deck-hands
on a cattle boat and reached Bristol in time. "I reckon we better cable grandfather where we are," Evelyn sug-
gested belatedly. Which they did, and a week later, as cadets in the Royal Flying Corps, they wrote fuller
details.

Ground school in the gray and ancient benignance of Oxford quadrangles, then flying school. They wrote <dutiful
and> dull and dutiful letters home at monthly intervals; Evelyn presently from a hospital where he lay with a
broken leg as the result of <a crash>
[margin: an accident he had suffered while trying to loop a <Sopwith Pup> Bristol scout off the ground]
Bayard visited him from time to time, appearing one day with a shoulder
strap to his Sam Browns and a pip on either shoulder. "You'll get yours soon as they let you out of here,"
he assured his brother. "Then we'll celebrate."

"You damn right," Evelyn sitting in a chair with his leg propped before him, agreed. "We'll raise hell."

But before Evelyn's leg was healed Bayard had gone out to Flanders to a Spad squadron. They wrote
to one another very occasionally, and Evelyn was well again and celebrated America's entry into the war by himself,
and in May, '16 he crossed the Channel with wings on his breast also, and he and his brother were in Boulogne
the same day without knowing it — Evelyn going to Pilot's Pool and Bayard returning to England; without knowing
it, on the way home. He had been loaned to the infant United States Air Service, and while Evelyn was up
toward Annas in a Cleigel Camel squadron, Bayard in his foreign martial harness and a thin English veneer
that <became> sat well upon him, after a fashion, was swanking his wings and his pale Bedford cords and shiny
boots and a small dull-gold moustache and that <fatal,> bleak, hooded falcon expression flying had given him,
about Memphis where he taught American would-be aces to fly and troubled the dreams of many a maiden
heart.

< Here he met and married Carolyn White, <<and left her in his grandfather's house and returned to war [illegible] meanwhile>>
and brought her to his grandfather's house in north Mississippi, <<and in April, '18 he was <<<ordered b>>> recalled
to England hurriedly.>> He was able to fly home every week-end, and presently they had settled down into an idyllic
routine which lasted through the winter and into the next spring, when it was interrupted by the German general
staff. <<and h>> He was recalled hurriedly by his adopted government, and in June, '18 Bayard went out again in
a <<Dolphin>> squadron. of S.E. 5's.

<<Yesterday had been treacherous.>> Yesterday had been a day of balmy langors, but when his batman waked him with
a cup of bitter scalding tea the dawn was like a portent. It lay somewhere to the east, a sluggish chalky rumor, and
the air was damp and raw with channel winds. Yet he stood and smoked his cigarette with actual impatience
while his machine was being rolled out and mechanics moved like intent ghosts about it. The dawn patrol was
just getting away and he had to wait until the reluctant engines choked and coughed to a steady high
crescendo, sank idling, then soared again as the flight rushed singly across the 'drome and rose and
assumed formation and faded diminishing into the gray east.>