Winged Victory is a novel about fighter pilots in the First World War, written by a surviving pilot. The odds against pilots were grim, life expectancy measured in weeks. This is not about glory, for war in the air is bloody murder rather than chivalric duels, but there's a certain grandeur in flight.

Yeats has two themes, communicated through his narrator Tom Cundall. The first is the sublime joy of flight in these primitive, first practical aeroplanes. There is an immense pleasure in playing among the clouds, contour chasing over Flanders Fields, throwing his Sopwith Camel around the sky and running at brass hats British staff cars.

But this is still war, and there are Huns, little black dots in the sky that alternate scamper away from Cundalls' flight, or come slashing down in diving attacks when they have superiority of position and numbers. There's Archie, mostly ineffective bursts of early flak, there's faulty engines and bad landings, and the hated fearful work of ground attacks, a deadly game of roulette on every patrol. The second theme is the declining state of Cundall's nerves, as the stress of months of war against the odds grinds him down, and seeking momentary pleasures in alcohol, wardroom banter, and French mademoiselles. Reading this is, appropriately enough, also exhausting. The book drones on about the other pilots, their mayfly lives, the stupidity of the war, the repetitive carousing, and says nothing.

Part of this might be time and cultural distance. I've read a lot of similar books about young Americans in Vietnam in the 1060s, and there the brief allusions are enough to work. English culture of the 1910s alien enough the allusions simply don't connect. Though I was glad to see their version of 'Ok Boomer' is 'Victorian sentimentality', the more things change etc. There's a really good 200 page book in here. Unfortunately my copy is twice that length. I can recognize Winged Victory as important without much liking it.