High Adventure A Narrative of Air Fighting in France Part 4

The War Office came to this opinion after Millard had smashed three machines in three tries. Wherever he may be now, I am sure that Chance is still ruling his destiny, and I hope, with all my heart, benevolently.

Our final triangle was completed uneventfully. J. B.'s motor behaved splendidly; I remembered my biograph at every stage of the journey, and we were at home again within three hours. We did our alt.i.tude tests and were then no longer _eleves-pilotes_, but _pilotes aviateurs_. By reason of this distinction we pa.s.sed from the rank of soldier of the second cla.s.s to that of corporal. At the tailor's shop the wings and star insignia were sewn upon our collars and our corporal's stripes upon our sleeves. For we were proud, as every aviator is proud, who reaches the end of his apprentices.h.i.+p and enters into the dignity of a brevetted military pilot.

Six months have pa.s.sed since I made the last entry in my journal. J.

B. was asleep in his historic bed, and I was sitting at a rickety table writing by candle-light, stopping now and then to listen to the mutter of guns on the Aisne front. It was only at night that we could hear them, and then not often, the very ghost of sound, as faint as the beating of the pulses in one's ears. That was a May evening, and this, one late in November. I arrived at the Gare du Nord only a few hours ago. Never before have I come to Paris with a finer sense of the joy of living. I walked down the rue Lafayette, through the rue de Provence, the rue du Havre, to a little hotel in the vicinity of the Gare Saint-Lazare. Under ordinary circ.u.mstances none of these streets, nor the people in them, would have appeared particularly interesting.

But on this occasion--it was the finest walk of my life. I saw everything with the eyes of the _permissionnaire_, and sniffed the odors of roasting chestnuts, of restaurants, of shops, of people, never so keenly aware of their numberless variety.

After dinner I walked out on the boulevards from the Madeleine to the Place de la Republique, through the maze of narrow streets to the river, and over the Pont Neuf to Notre Dame. I was surprised that the spell which Hugo gives it should have lost none of its old potency for me after coming direct from the realities of modern warfare. If he were writing this journal, what a story it would be!

It will be necessary to pa.s.s rapidly over the period between the day when we received our _brevets militaires_ and that upon which we started for the front. The event which bulked largest to us was, of course, the departure on active service. Preceding it, and next in importance, was the last phase of our training and the culmination of it all, at the School of Acrobacy. Preliminary to our work there, we had a six weeks' course of instruction, first on the twin-motor Caudron and then on various types of the Nieuport biplane. We thought the Caudron a magnificent machine. We liked the steady throb of its powerful motors, the enormous spread of its wings, the slow, ponderous way it had of answering to the controls. It was our business to take officer observers for long trips about the country while they made photographs, spotted dummy batteries, and perfected themselves in the wireless code. At that time the Caudron had almost pa.s.sed its period of usefulness at the front, and there was a prospect of our being transferred to the yet larger and more powerful Letord, a three-pa.s.senger biplane carrying two machine gunners besides the pilot, and from three to five machine guns. This appealed to us mightily. J. B. was always talking of the time when he would command not only a machine, but also a "gang of men." However, being Americans, and recruited for a particular combat corps which flies only single-seater _avions de cha.s.se_, we eventually followed the usual course of training for such pilots. We pa.s.sed in turn to the Nieuport biplane, which compares in speed and grace with these larger craft as the flight of a swallow with the movements of a great lazy buzzard. And now the Nieuport has been surpa.s.sed, and almost entirely supplanted, by the Spad of 140, 180, 200, and 230 horse-power, and we have transferred our allegiance to each in turn, marveling at the genius of the French in motor and aircraft construction.

At last we were ready for acrobacy. I will not give an account of the trials by means of which one's ability as a combat pilot is most severely tested. This belongs among the pages of a textbook rather than in those of a journal of this kind. But to us who were to undergo the ordeal,--for it is an ordeal for the untried pilot,--our typewritten notes on acrobacy read like the pages of a fascinating romance. A year or two ago these aerial maneuvers would have been thought impossible. Now we were all to do them as a matter of routine training.

The worst of it was, that our civilian pursuits offered no criterion upon which to base forecasts of our ability as acrobats. There was J.

B., for example. He knew a mixed metaphor when he saw one, for he had had wide experience with them as an English instructor at a New England "prep" school. But he had never done a barrel turn, or anything resembling it. How was he to know what his reaction would be to this bewildering maneuver, a series of rapid, horizontal, corkscrew turns? And to what use could I put my hazy knowledge of Ma.s.sachusetts statutes dealing with neglect and non-support of family, in that exciting moment when, for the first time, I should be whirling earthward in a spinning nose-dive? Accidents and fatalities were most frequent at the school of acrobacy, for the reason that one could not know, beforehand, whether he would be able to keep his head, with the earth gone mad, spinning like a top, standing on one rim, turning upside down.

In the end we all mastered it after a fas.h.i.+on, for the tests are by no means so difficult of accomplishment as they appear to be. Up to this time, November 28, 1917, there has been but one American killed at it in French schools. We were not all good acrobats. One must have a knack for it which many of us will never be able to acquire. The French have it in larger proportion than do we Americans. I can think of no sight more pleasing than that of a Spad in the air, under the control of a skillful French pilot. Swallows perch in envious silence on the chimney pots, and the crows caw in sullen despair from the hedgerows.

At G. D. E., while awaiting our call to the front, we perfected ourselves in these maneuvers, and practiced them in combat and group flying. There, the restraints of the schools were removed, for we were supposed to be accomplished pilots. We flew when and in what manner we liked. Sometimes we went out in large formations, for a long flight; sometimes, in groups of two or three, we made sham attacks on villages, or trains, or motor convoys on the roads. It was forbidden to fly over Paris, and for this reason we took all the more delight in doing it. J. B. and I saw it in all its moods: in the haze of early morning, at midday when the air had been washed clean by spring rains, in the soft light of afternoon,--domes, theaters, temples, spires, streets, parks, the river, bridges, all of it spread out in magnificent panorama. We would circle over Montmartre, Neuilly, the Bois, Saint-Cloud, the Latin Quarter, and then full speed homeward, listening anxiously to the sound of our motors until we spiraled safely down over our aerodrome. Our monitor never asked questions. He is one of many Frenchmen whom we shall always remember with grat.i.tude.

We learned the songs of all motors, the peculiarities and uses of all types of French _avions_, pushers and tractors, single motor and bimotor, monoplace, biplace, and triplace, monoplane and biplane. And we mingled with the pilots of all these many kinds of aircraft. They were arriving and departing by every train, for G. D. E. is the depot for old pilots from the front, transferring from one branch of aviation to another, as well as for new ones fresh from the schools.

In our talks with them, we became convinced that the air service is forming its traditions and developing a new type of mind. It even has an odor, as peculiar to itself as the smell of the sea to a s.h.i.+p.

There are those who say that it is only a compound of burnt castor oil and gasoline. One might, with no more truth, call the odor of a s.h.i.+p a mixture of tar and stale cooking. But let it pa.s.s. It will be all things to all men; I can sense it as I write, for it gets into one's clothing, one's hair, one's very blood.

We were as happy during those days at G. D. E. as any one has the right to be. Our whole duty was to fly, and never was the voice of Duty heard more gladly. It was hard to keep in mind the stern purpose behind this seeming indulgence. At times I remembered Drew's warning that we were military pilots and had no right to forget the seriousness of the work before us. But he himself often forgot it for days together. War on the earth may be reasonable and natural, but in the air it seems the most senseless folly. How is an airman, who has just learned a new meaning for the joy of life, to reconcile himself to the insane business of killing a fellow aviator who may have just learned it too? This was a question which we sometimes put to ourselves in purely Arcadian moments. We answered it, of course.

I was sitting at our two-legged table, writing up my _carnet de vol_.

Suzanne, the maid of all work at the Bonne Rencontre, was sweeping a pa.s.sageway along the center of the room, telling me, as she worked, about her family. She was ticking off the names of her brothers and sisters, when Drew put his head through the doorway.

"Il y a Pierre," said Suzanne.

"We're posted," said J. B.

"Et Helene," she continued.

I shall never know the names of the others.

V

OUR FIRST PATROL

We got down from the train late in the afternoon at a village which reminded us, at first glance, of a boom town in the Far West. Crude shelters of corrugated iron and rough pine boards faced each other down the length of one long street. They looked sadly out of place in that landscape. They did not have the cheery, buoyant ugliness of pioneer homes in an unsettled country, for behind them were the ruins of the old village, fragments of blackened wall, stone chimneys filled with acc.u.mulations of rubbish, garden-plots choked with weeds, reminding us that here was no outpost of a new civilization, but the desolation of an old one, fallen upon evil days.

A large crowd of _permissionnaires_ had left the train with us. We were not at ease among these men, many of them well along in middle life, bent and streaming with perspiration under their heavy packs. We were much better able than most of them to carry our belongings, to endure the fatigue of a long night march to billets or trenches; and we were waiting for the motor in which we should ride comfortably to our aerodrome. There we should sleep in beds, well housed from the weather, and far out of the range of sh.e.l.l fire.

"It isn't fair," said J. B. "It is going to war _de luxe_. These old poilus ought to be the aviators. But, hang it all! Of course, they couldn't be. Aviation is a young man's business. It has to be that way. And you can't have aerodromes along the front-line trenches."

Nevertheless, it did seem very unfair, and we were uncomfortable among all those infantrymen. The feeling increased when attention was called to our branch of the service by the distant booming of anti-aircraft guns. There were shouts in the street, "A Boche!" We hurried to the door of the cafe where we had been hiding. Officers were ordering the crowds off the street. "Hurry along there! Under cover! Oh, I know that you're brave enough, mon enfant. It isn't that. He's not to see all these soldiers here. That's the reason. Allez! Vite!"

Soldiers were going into dugouts and cellars among the ruined houses.

Some of them, seeing us at the door of the cafe, made pointed remarks as they pa.s.sed, grumbling loudly at the laxity of the air service.

"It's up there you ought to be, mon vieux, not here," one of them said, pointing to the white _eclatements_.

"You see that?" said another. "He's a Boche, not French, I can tell you that. Where are your comrades?"

There was much good-natured chaffing as well, but through it all I could detect a note of resentment. I sympathized with their point of view then as I do now, although I know that there is no ground for the complaint of laxity. Here is a German over French territory. Where are the French aviators? Soldiers forget that aerial frontiers must be guarded in two dimensions, and that it is always possible for an airman to penetrate far into enemy country. They do not see their own pilots on their long raids into German territory. Furthermore, while the outward journey is often accomplished easily enough, the return home is a different matter. Telephones are busy from the moment the lines are crossed, and a hostile patrol, to say nothing of a lone _avion_, will be fortunate if it returns safely.

But infantrymen are to be forgiven readily for their outbursts against the aviation service. They have far more than their share of danger and death while in the trenches. To have their brief periods of rest behind the lines broken into by enemy aircraft--who would blame them for complaining? And they are often generous enough with their praise.

On this occasion there was no bombing. The German remained at a great height and quickly turned northward again.

Dunham and Miller came to meet us. We had all four been in the schools together, they preceding us on active service only a couple of months.

Seeing them after this lapse of time, I was conscious of a change.

They were keen about life at the front, but they talked of their experiences in a way which gave one a feeling of tension, a tautness of muscles, a kind of ache in the throat. It set me to thinking of a conversation I had had with an old French pilot, several months before. It came apropos of nothing. Perhaps he thought that I was sizing him up, wondering how he could be content with an instructor's job while the war is in progress. He said: "I've had five hundred hours over the lines. You don't know what that means, not yet. I'm no good any more. It's strain. Let me give you some advice. Save your nervous energy. You will need all you have and more. Above everything else, don't think at the front. The best pilot is the best machine."

Dunham was talking about patrols.

"Two a day of two hours each. Occasionally you will have six hours'

flying, but almost never more than that."

"What about voluntary patrols?" Drew asked. "I don't suppose there is any objection, is there?"

Miller pounded Dunham on the back, singing, "_Hi-doo-dedoo-dum-di_.

What did I tell you! Do I win?" Then he explained. "We asked the same question when we came out, and every other new pilot before us. This voluntary patrol business is a kind of standing joke. You think, now, that four hours a day over the lines is a light programme. For the first month or so you will go out on your own between times. After that, no. Of course, when they call for a voluntary patrol for some necessary piece of work, you will volunteer out of a sense of duty. As I say, you may do as much flying as you like. But wait. After a month, or we'll give you six weeks, that will be no more than you have to do."

We were not at all convinced.

"What do you do with the rest of your time?"

"Sleep," said Dunham. "Read a good deal. Play some poker or bridge.

Walk. But sleep is the chief amus.e.m.e.nt. Eight hours used to be enough for me. Now I can do with ten or twelve."

Drew said: "That's all rot. You fellows are having it too soft. They ought to put you on the school regime again."

"Let 'em talk, Dunham. They know. J. B. says it's laziness. Let it go at that. Well, take it from me, it's contagious. You'll soon be victims."

I dropped out of the conversation in order to look around me. Drew did all of the questioning, and thanks to his interest, I got many hints about our work which came back opportunely, afterward.

"Think down to the gunners. That will help a lot. It's a game after that: your skill against theirs. I couldn't do it at first, and sh.e.l.l fire seemed absolutely d.a.m.nable."

"And you want to remember that a cha.s.se machine is almost never brought down by anti-aircraft fire. You are too fast for them. You can fool 'em in a thousand ways."