High Adventure A Narrative of Air Fighting in France Part 2

Paris was our emotional storehouse, to use Kipling's term, during the time we were at B----. We spent our Sunday afternoons there, mingling with the crowds on the boulevards, or, in pleasant weather, sitting outside the cafes, watching the soldiers of the world go by. The streets were filled with _permissionnaires_ from all parts of the Western front, and there were many of those despised of all the rest, the _embusques_, as they are called, who hold the comfortable billets in safe places well back of the lines. It was very easy to distinguish them from the men newly arrived from the trenches, in whose eyes one saw the look of wonder, almost of unbelief, that there was still a goodly world to be enjoyed. It was often beyond the pathetic to see them trying to satisfy their need for all the wholesome things of life in a brief seven days of leave; to see the family parties at the modest restaurants on the side streets, making merry in a kind of forced way, as if every one were thinking of the brevity of the time for such enjoyment.

Scarcely a week went by without bringing one or two additional recruits to the Franco-American Corps. We wondered why they came so slowly. There must have been thousands of Americans who would have been, not only willing, but glad to join us; and yet the opportunities for doing so had been made widely known. For those who did come this was the legitimate by-product of glorious adventure and a training in aviation not to be surpa.s.sed in Europe. This was to be had by any healthy young American, almost for the asking; but our numbers increased very gradually, from fifteen to twenty-five, until by the spring of 1917 there were fifty of us at the various aviation schools of France. Territorially we represented at least a dozen states, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. There were rich men's sons and poor men's sons among our number; the sons of very old families, and those who neither knew nor cared what their antecedents were.

The same was true of our French comrades, for membership in the French air service is not based upon wealth or family position or political influence. The policy of the Government is as broad and democratic as may be. Men are chosen because of an apt.i.tude that promises well, or as a reward for distinguished service at the front. A few of the French _eleves-pilotes_ had been officers, but most of them N.C.O.'s and private soldiers in infantry or artillery regiments. This very wide lat.i.tude in choice at first seemed "laxitude" to some of us Americans. But evidently, experience in training war pilots, and the practical results obtained by these men at the front, have been proof enough to the French authorities of the folly of setting rigid standards, making hard-and-fast rules to be met by prospective aviators. As our own experience increased, we saw the wisdom of a policy which is more concerned with a man's courage, his self-reliance, and his powers of initiative, than with his ability to work out theoretical problems in aerodynamics.

There are many French pilots with excellent records of achievement in war-flying who have but a sketchy knowledge of motor and aircraft construction. Some are college-bred men, but many more have only a common-school education. It is not at all strange that this should be the case, for one may have had no technical training worth mentioning; one may have only a casual speaking acquaintance with motors, and a very imperfect idea of why and how one is able to defy the law of gravity, and yet prove his worth as a pilot in what is, after all, the best possible way--by his record at the front.

A judicious amount of theoretical instruction is, of course, not wanting in the aviation schools of France; but its importance is not exaggerated. We Americans, with our imperfect knowledge of the language, lost the greater part of this. The handicap was not a serious one, and I think I may truthfully say that we kept pace with our French comrades. The most important thing was to gain actual flying experience, and as much of it as possible. Only in this way can one acquire a sensitive ear for motors, and an accurate sense of flying speed: the feel of one's machine in the air. These are of the greatest importance. Once the pilot has developed this airman's sixth sense, he need not, and never does, worry about the scantiness of his knowledge of the theory of flight.

Sometimes the winds would die away and the thick clouds lift, and we would go joyously to work on a morning of crisp, bright winter weather. Then we had moments of glorious revenge upon the crows. They would watch us from afar, holding noisy indignation meetings in a row of weather-beaten trees at the far side of the field. And when some inexperienced pilot lost control of his machine and came crashing to earth, they would take the air in a body, circling over the wreckage, cawing and jeering with the most evident delight. "The Oriental Wrecking Company," as the Annamites were called, were on the scene almost as quickly as our enemies the crows. They were a familiar sight on every working day, chattering together in their high-pitched gutturals, as they hauled away the wrecked machines. They appeared to side with the birds, and must have thought us the most absurd of men, making wings for ourselves, and always coming to grief when we tried to use them.

We made progress regardless of all this skepticism. It was necessarily slow, for beginners at a single-command monoplane school are permitted to fly only under the most favorable weather conditions. Even then, old Mother Earth, who is not kindly disposed toward those of her children who leave her so jauntily, would clutch us back to her bosom, whenever we gave her the slightest opportunity, with an embrace that was anything but tender. We were inclined to think rather highly of our own courage in defying her; and sometimes our vanity was increased by our _moniteurs_. After an exciting misadventure they often gave expression to their relief at finding an amateur pilot still whole, by praising his "presence of mind" in too generous French fashion.

We should not have been so proud, I think, of our own little exploits, had we remembered those of the pioneers in aviation, so many of whom lost their lives in experiment with the first crude types of the heavier-than-air machines. They were pioneers in the fine and splendid meaning of the word--men to be compared in spirit with the old fifteenth-century navigators. We were but followers, adventuring, in comparative safety, along a well-defined trail.

This, at any rate, was Drew's opinion. He would never allow me the pleasure of indulging in any flights of fancy over these trivial adventures of ours. He would never let me set them off against "the heroic background" of Paris. As for Paris, we saw nothing of war there, he would say, except the lighter side, the homecoming, leave-enjoying side. We needed to know more of the horror and the tragedy of it. We needed to keep that close and intimate to us as a right perspective for our future adventures. He believed it to be our duty as aviators to antic.i.p.ate every kind of experience which we might have to meet at the front. His imagination was abnormally vivid. Once he discussed the possibility of "falling in flames," which is so often the end of an airman's career. I shall never again be able to take the same whole-hearted delight in flying that I did before he was so horribly eloquent upon the subject. He often speculated upon one's emotions in falling in a machine damaged beyond the possibility of control.

"Now try to imagine it," he would say: "your gasoline tanks have been punctured and half of your _fuselage_ has been shot away. You believe that there is not the slightest chance for you to save your life. What are you going to do--lose your head and give up the game? No, you've got to attempt the impossible"; and so on, and so forth.

I would accuse him of being morbid. Furthermore, I saw no reason why we should plan for terrible emergencies which might never arrive. His answer was that we were military pilots in training for combat machines. We had no right to ignore the grimness of the business ahead of us. If we did, so much the worse for us when we should go to the front. But beyond this practical interest, he had a great curiosity about the nature of fear, and a great dread of it, too. He was afraid that in some last adventure, in which death came slowly enough for him to recognize it, he might die like a terror-stricken animal, and not bravely, as a man should.

We did not often discuss these gruesome possibilities, although this was not Drew's fault. I would not listen to him; and so he would be silent about them until convinced that the furtherance of our careers as airmen demanded additional unpleasant imaginings. There was something of the Hindoo fanatic in him; or perhaps it was the outcropping of the stern spirit of his New England forbears. But when he talked of the pleasant side of the adventures before us, it was more than compensation for all the rest. Then he would make me restless and impatient, for I did not have his faculty of enjoyment in antic.i.p.ation. The early period of training, when we were flying only a few metres above the ground, seemed endless.

At last came the event which really marked the beginning of our careers as airmen: the first _tour de piste_, the first flight round the aerodrome. We had talked of this for weeks, but when at last the day for it came, our enthusiasm had waned. We were eager to try our wings and yet afraid to make the start.

This first _tour de piste_ was always the occasion for a gathering of the Americans, and there was the usual a.s.sembly present. The beginners were there to shiver in antic.i.p.ation of their own forthcoming trials, and the more advanced pilots, who had already taken the leap, to offer gratuitous advice.

"Now don't try to pull any big league stuff. Not too much rudder on the turns. Remember how that Frenchman piled up on the Farman hangars when he tried to bank the corners."

"You'll find it pretty rotten when you go over the woods. The air currents there are something scandalous!"

"Believe me, it's a lot worse over the fort. Rough? Oh, la la!"

"And that's where you have to cut your motor and dive, if you're going to make a landing without hanging up in the telephone wires."

"When you do come down, don't be afraid to stick her nose forward.

Scare the life out of you, that drop will, but you may as well get used to it in the beginning."

"But wait till we see them redress! Where's the Oriental Wrecking Gang?"

"Don't let that worry you, Drew: pan-caking isn't too bad. Not in a Bleriot. Just like falling through a shingle roof. Can't hurt yourself much."

"If you do spill, make it a good one. There hasn't been a decent smash-up to-day."

These were the usual comforting a.s.surances. They did not frighten us much, although there was just enough truth in the warnings to make us uneasy. We took our hazing as well as we could inwardly, and of course with imperturbable calm outwardly; but, to make a confession, I was somewhat reluctant to hear the businesslike "Allez! en route!" of our _moniteur_.

When it came, I taxied across to the other side of the field, turned into the wind, and came racing back, full motor. It seemed a thing of tremendous power, that little forty-five-horsepower Anzani. The roar of it struck awe into my soul, and I gripped the controls in no very professional manner. Then, when I had gathered full ground speed, I eased her off gently, and up we went, over the cla.s.s and the a.s.sembled visitors, above the hangars, the lake, the forest, until, at the halfway point, my altimetre registered three hundred and fifty metres.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw all the beautiful countryside spread out beneath me, but I was too busily occupied to take in the prospect.

I was watching my wings, nervously, in order to antic.i.p.ate and counteract the slightest pitch of the machine. But nothing happened, and I soon realized that this first grand tour was not going to be nearly so bad as we had been led to believe. I began to enjoy it. I even looked down over the side of the _fuselage_, although it was a very hasty glance.

All the time I was thinking of the rapidly approaching moment when I should have to come down. I knew well enough how the descent was to be made. It was very simple. I had only to shut off my motor, push forward with my "broom-stick,"--the control connected with the elevating planes,--and then wait and redress gradually, beginning at from six to eight metres from the ground. The descent would be exciting, a little more rapid than Shooting the Chutes. Only one could not safely hold on to the sides of the car and await the splash. That sort of thing had sometimes been done in aeroplanes, by over-excited pilots. The results were disastrous, without exception.

The moment for the decision came. I was above the fort, otherwise I should not have known when to dive. At first the sensation was, I imagine, exactly that of falling, feet foremost; but after pulling back slightly on the controls, I felt the machine answer to them, and the uncomfortable feeling pa.s.sed. I brought up on the ground in the usual b.u.mpy manner of the beginner. Nothing gave way, however, so this did not spoil the fine rapture of a rare moment. It was shared--at least it was pleasant to think so--by my old Annamite friend of the Penguin experience, who stood by his flag nodding his head at me. He said, "Beaucoup bon," showing his polished black teeth in an approving grin. I forgot for the moment that "beaucoup bon" was his enigmatical comment upon all occasions, and that he would have grinned just as broadly had he been dragging me out from a ma.s.s of wreckage.

Drew came in a few moments later, making an almost perfect landing. In the evening we walked to a neighboring village, where we had a wonderful dinner to celebrate the end of our apprenticeship. It was a curious feast. We had little to say to one another, or, better, we were both afraid to talk. We were under an enchantment which words would have broken. After a silent meal, we walked all the way home without speaking.

We started off together on our triangles. That was in April, just pa.s.sed, so that I have now brought this casual diary almost up to date. We were then at the great school of aviation at A---- in central France, where, for the first time, we were a.s.sociated with men in training for every branch of aviation service, and became familiar with other types of French machines. But the brevet tests, which every pilot must pa.s.s before he becomes a military aviator, were the same in every department of the school. The triangles were two cross-country flights of two hundred kilometres each, three landings to be made _en route_, and each flight to be completed within forty-eight hours. In addition, there were two short voyages of sixty kilometres each--these preceded the triangular tests--and an hour of flight at a minimum alt.i.tude of sixty-five hundred feet.

The short voyages gave us a delightful foretaste of what was to come.

We did them both one afternoon, and were at the hangars at five o'clock on the following morning, ready to make an early start. A fresh wind was blowing from the northeast, but the brevet _moniteur_, who went up for a short flight to try the air, came back with the information that it was quite calm at twenty-five hundred feet. We might start, he said, as soon as we liked.

Drew, in his joy, embraced the old woman who kept a coffee-stall at the hangars, while I danced a one-step with a mechanician. Neither of them was surprised at this procedure. They were accustomed to such emotional outbursts on the part of aviators who, by the very nature of their calling, were always in the depths of despair or on the farthest jutting peak of some mountain of delight. Our departure had been delayed, day after day, for more than a week, because of the weather. We were so eager to start that we would willingly have gone off in a blizzard.

During the week of waiting we had studied our map until we knew the location of every important road and railroad, every forest, river, ca.n.a.l, and creek within a radius of one hundred kilometres. We studied it at close range, on a table, and then on the floor, with the compa.s.s-points properly orientated, so that we might see all the important landmarks with the birdman's eye. We knew our course so well, that there seemed no possibility of our losing direction.

Our military papers had been given us several days before. Among these was an official-looking doc.u.ment to be presented to the mayor of any town or village near which we might be compelled to land. It contained an extract from the law concerning aviators, and the duty toward them of the civilian and military authorities. In another was an itemized list of the amounts which might be exacted by farmers for damage to growing crops: so much for an _atterrissage_ in a field of sugar-beets, so much for wheat, etc. Besides these, we had a book of detailed instructions as to our duty in case of emergencies of every conceivable kind--among others, the course of action to be followed if we should be compelled to land in an enemy country. At first sight this seemed an unnecessary precaution; but we remembered the experience of one of our French comrades at B----, who started confidently off on his first cross-country flight. He lost his way and did not realize how far astray he had gone until he found himself under fire from German anti-aircraft batteries on the Belgian front.

The most interesting paper of all was our _Ordre de Service_, the text of which was as follows:

It is commanded that the bearer of this Order report himself at the cities of C---- and R----, by the route of the air, flying an avion Caudron, and leaving the Ecole Militaire d'Aviation at A---- on the 21st of April, 1917, without pa.s.senger on board.

Signed, LE CAPITAINE B---- Commandant de l'Ecole.

We read this with feelings which must have been nearly akin to those of Columbus on a memorable day in 1492 when he received his clearance papers from Cadiz. "By the route of the air!" How the imagination lingered over that phrase! We had the better of Columbus there, although we had to admit that there was more glamour in the hazard of his adventure and the uncertainty of his destination.

Drew was ready first. I helped him into his fur-lined combination and strapped him to his seat. A moment later he was off. I watched him as he gathered height over the aerodrome. Then, finding that his motor was running satisfactorily, he struck out in an easterly direction, his machine growing smaller and smaller until it vanished in the early morning haze. I followed immediately afterward, and had a busy ten minutes, being buffeted this way and that, until, as the brevet _moniteur_ had foretold, I reached quiet air at twenty-five hundred feet.

This was my first experience in pa.s.sing from one air current to another. It was a unique one, for I was still a little incredulous. I had not entirely lost my old boyhood belief that the wind went all the way up.

I pa.s.sed over the old cathedral town of B----at fifteen hundred metres. Many a pleasant afternoon had we spent there, walking through its narrow, crooked streets, or lounging on the banks of the ca.n.a.l.

The cathedral too was a favorite haunt. I loved the fine s.p.a.ciousness of it. Looking down on it now, it seemed no larger than a toy cathedral in a toy town, such as one sees in the shops of Paris. The streets were empty, for it was not yet seven o'clock. Strips of shadow crossed them where taller roofs cut off the sunshine. A toy train, which I could have put nicely into my fountain-pen case, was pulling into a station no larger than a wren's house. The Greeks called their G.o.ds "derisive." No doubt they realized how small they looked to them, and how insignificant this little world of affairs must have appeared from high Olympus.

There was a road, a fine straight thoroughfare converging from the left. It led almost due southwest. This was my route to C----. I followed it, climbing steadily until I was at two thousand metres. I had never flown so high before. "Over a mile!" I thought. It seemed a tremendous alt.i.tude. I could see scores of villages and fine old chateaux, and great stretches of forest, and miles upon miles of open country in checkered patterns, just beginning to show the first fresh green of the early spring crops. It looked like a world planned and laid out by the best of Santa Clauses for the eternal delight of all good children. And for untold generations only the birds have had the privilege of seeing and enjoying it from the wing. Small wonder that they sing. As for non-musical birds--well, they all sing after a fashion, and there is no doubt that crows, at least, are extremely jealous of their prerogative of flight.

My biplane was flying itself. I had nothing to do other than to give occasional attention to the revolution counter, altimetre, and speed-dial. The motor was running with perfect regularity. The propeller was turning over at twelve hundred revolutions per minute without the slightest fluctuation. Flying is the simplest thing in the world, I thought. Why doesn't every one travel by route of the air?

If people knew the joy of it, the exhilaration of it, aviation schools would be overwhelmed with applicants. Biplanes of the Farman and Voisin type would make excellent family cars, quite safe for women to drive. Mothers, busy with household affairs, could tell their children to "run out and fly" a Caudron such as I was driving, and feel not the slightest anxiety about them. I remembered an imaginative drawing I had once seen of aerial activity in 1950. Even house pets were granted the privilege of traveling by the air route. The artist was not far wrong except in his date. He should have put it at 1925. On a fine April morning there seemed no limit to the realization of such interesting possibilities.

I had no more than started on my southwest course, as it seemed to me, when I saw the spires and the red-roofed houses of C----, and, a kilometre or so from the outskirts, the barracks and hangars of the aviation school where I was to make the first landing. I reduced the gas, and, with the motor purring gently, began a long, gradual descent. It was interesting to watch the change in the appearance of the country beneath me as I lost height. Checkerboard patterns of brown and green grew larger and larger. Shining threads of silver became rivers and ca.n.a.ls, tiny green shrubs became trees, individual aspects of houses emerged. Soon I could see people going about the streets and laundry-maids hanging out the family washing in the back gardens. I even came low enough to witness a minor household tragedy--a mother vigorously spanking a small boy. Hearing the whir of my motor, she stopped in the midst of the process, whereupon the youngster very naturally took advantage of his opportunity to cut and run for it. Drew doubted my veracity when I told him about this. He called me an aerial eavesdropper and said that I ought to be ashamed to go buzzing over towns at such low alt.i.tudes, frightening housemaids, disorganizing domestic penal inst.i.tutions, and generally disturbing the privacy of respectable French citizens. But I was unrepentant, for I knew that one small boy in France was thinking of me with joy. To have escaped maternal justice with the a.s.sistance of an aviator would be an event of glorious memory to him. How vastly more worth while such a method of escape, and how jubilant Tom Sawyer would have been over such an opportunity when his horrified warning, "Look behind you, aunt!" had lost efficacy.

Drew had been waiting a quarter of an hour, and came rushing out to meet me as I taxied across the field. We shook hands as though we had not seen each other for years. We could not have been more surprised and delighted if we had met on another planet after long and hopeless wanderings in s.p.a.ce.

While I superintended the replenishing of my fuel and oil tanks he walked excitedly up and down in front of the hangars. He was an odd-looking sight in his flying clothes, with a pair of Meyrowitz goggles set back on his head, like another set of eyes, gazing at the sky with an air of wide astonishment. He paid no attention to my critical comments, but started thinking aloud as soon as I rejoined him.

"It was lonely! Yes, by Jove! that was it. A glorious thing, one's isolation up there; but it was too profound to be pleasant. A relief to get down again, to hear people talk, to feel the solid earth under one's feet. How did it impress you?"

This was like Drew. I felt ashamed of the lightness of my own thoughts, but I had to tell him of my speculations upon after-the-war developments in aviation: nurses flying Voisins, with the cars filled with babies; old men having after-dinner naps in twenty-three-metre Nieuports, fitted, for safety, with Sperry gyroscopes; family parties taking comfortable outings in gigantic biplanes of the R-6 type; mothers, as of old, gazing apprehensively at speed-dials, cautioning fathers about "driving too fast," and all of the rest.

Drew looked at me reprovingly, to be sure, but he felt the need, just as I did, of an outlet to his feelings, and so he turned to this kind of comic relief with the most delightful reluctance. He quickly lost his reserve, and in the imaginative spree which followed we went far beyond the last outposts of absurdity. We laughed over our own wit until our faces were tired. However, I will not be explicit about our folly. It might not be so amusing from a critical point of view.