To see the planet from a great height leads to thoughts painted with broad strokes. From the perspective of the observer’s seat in a DH 4, above the smoke and cinders of fires, with the cold reaching around his goggles into his skin, Lee was trying to come to any conclusion other than the most obvious one.

She was a good ride. The ice cube.

And Lee had handed Ripley his pistol.

Lee’s Springfield was in the cockpit, which was a good thing. It was strapped down, a leather braid around its butt. He stared at it.

Life means nothing, Lee thought. They passed over what was once a village, and in the center, a red brick smokestack, which Lee saw was flanked by ruined buildings and delivery wagons that were now splintered. He’d seen—he thought—huge sacks, flour and sugar maybe, and he said aloud, in words swallowed by the engine’s mighty wailing, “See, that man just wanted to have a bakery.”

13

Decades later, in Vevey, Switzerland, dictating his life story, Chaplin asked Ingrid Etter, his amanuensis, if she had made sure to write September 15, 1918, in especially dark ink. When he read his manuscript aloud to visitors, he would pause on that date, and his guests, hesitant to interrupt their thickset host, felt they should not even breathe until he resumed. Sometimes he picked up the story again, but more often, he called the recitation to a halt, and retired early, knees cracking with every step up the marble stairs. The published version of his autobiography omits the date entirely.

By September 15, Chaplin had shot most of his film, which he decided wasn’t called Camouflage, because that was secretly a bit snide. That went along with his early ideas, dogs dragging soldiers’ bones across battlefields—clever ideas, idealistic notions the average soldier would bayonet him for. He cut the darker overtones, the starvation, the dogs, the lice, and played up the slapstick of capturing the Kaiser. And he slapped on an ending that, even as he was shooting it, struck him as the worst of any of his films: The Little Fellow wakes up. It’s all been a dream. Dear God.