The Brighton Boys with the Flying Corps Part 7

"These airplanes are stronger than any we have ever seen," remarked Joe Little, as they paused before a new-type French machine.

"Yes," cheerily commented an aviator---a clean-cut young Englishman---who was grooming the graceful plane. "This very one crashed into the ground two weeks ago while going at over sixty miles an hour. She is so strongly built that she was not hurt much and the pilot escaped without a scratch. This is what we call a 'hunter.' She has an unbeaten record for speed---can show a clean pair of heels to anything in the air. She has tremendous power; and the way she can climb into the clouds---my word!"

"Is she easy to fly?" asked d.i.c.ky Mann.

"Not bad," was the answer. "The high speed makes for a bust-up once in a while. A pilot who gets going over one hundred and fifteen miles an hour, and yanks his machine up to six thousand feet in seven minutes, as he can do on this type of plane, and then drops straight down from that elevation, as the 'hunter' fellows have to do sometimes, puts a mighty big strain on his bus. Little by little this sort of thing dislocates important parts. Of course the pursuing game makes a pilot put his machine into all sorts of positions. He has to jump at the other chap, sometimes, at an angle of ninety degrees. I have known of cases where the air pressure caused by such a drop has been so great that the planes of one of these 'hunters' have been broken off with a snap."

"Jiminy!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed d.i.c.ky.

At this the aviator laughed, saying smilingly: "Accidents of some sort take place here several times a day. If they didn't we would not get on so fast either in the study of aeroplane construction or the art of flying itself. Accidents tell us lots of things. Between studying accidents and watching for Boche ideas, especially when we get hold of one of their late machines, we are never standing still at this game, I can tell you."

"Do you get many German planes?" asked Jimmy Hill.

"We _down_ lots of 'em, but we don't get many---which is different,"

and the aviator smiled. "You see the Boche fliers stay their side, mostly, and when we drop one he goes down among his own lot. Now the hostile hunters for instance, rarely go over our lines. Their business apparently is to remain over their own territory. That is their plan. They are brave enough. But the Germans look to their hunters chiefly to prevent our observers from doing their work. They wait for our observation machines where they know the observers must come. That is their game. Just get some of the fellows who have been over recently, when you get up front a bit, to tell you how the new Fokkers hide themselves and pounce on our lot.

"Maybe the Boches look at it this way: if they have their fight at their base of operations, over their own lines, and win out, they may make a prisoner; if the machine is not destroyed, that may be utilized. If their man gets put out of commission we don't get the beaten machine and therefore cannot learn their latest construction dodges from it. It's a different plan of action. We go right out over the German lines with our hunters and tackle their observers, who do their reconnaissances from a bit back of their lines. Only in the very first part of the war, when the Germans outnumbered us in fliers to an enormous extent, did they try to do much from our top-side. Nowadays we do our observing daily from well over the enemy's lines; and the Germans do most of theirs from well on their own side. It's a different way of looking at it."

"Surely our way must be more efficient," said Joe Little.

"We think so," a.s.sented the aviator. "We know more of their lines than they can possibly know of ours. For the rest of this war I guess we will have to do so. We are going forward from now on, and the Teutons are going back, and don't you forget it. We have to know their lines well, and lots of other things, such as their routes of supply and reinforcement, and their gun positions and munition dumps.

Our guns look to us, too, in a way they did not look to us a year ago, even. It's a big game."

The Brighton boys walked on slowly, without comment. Yes, it was a big game, in very truth. The closer they came to it the bigger it became.

"h.e.l.lo! There is a monoplane. I thought there were no monoplanes in use now," said Bob Haines as they pa.s.sed a round-bodied fleet-looking machine with a single pair of wings. It was a single-seater. They walked up to it and round it, gazing admiringly at its neat lines.

"What sort of a plane is this?" asked Bob of a mechanic who was standing beside the machine.

"An absolute hummer," was the reply. "Want to try her? You have to be an Ace to get into her driving seat, son."

Bob flushed, and was inclined to answer sharply, but Joe Little stepped forward and said quietly: "We have just got here from the States.

Came last night. This is our first look-around, and we want to learn all we can. We did not know monoplanes were being used now.

The only aeroplanes we have flown have been biplanes. Won't you tell us something about this type?"

"Certainly," said the mechanic. "I was only joking. No one can fly this sort of machine except the most experienced and best pilots.

It is the fastest machine in the world. It is a Morane, and they call it a 'Monocoque.' Someone told me that the latest type German Fokker was modeled on this machine. It is a corker, but the trickiest thing to fly that was ever made. We have only got one here. I heard a French flyer say the other day that the Spad biplane was faster than this machine, but I don't believe it."

"What is an Ace?" queried Jimmy Hill.

"That term started with the French," answered the mechanic. "We use it here now, sometimes. It means a superior aviator, who has brought down five adversaries, in fair air-fight. The bringing-down business, at least so far as the exact number is concerned, is not always applied, I guess. They just call a man an Ace when he is a real graduate flyer, and gets the habit of bringing down his Boche when he goes after him."

Every conversation around that part of the world seemed to have a grim flavor. The Brighton boys were getting nearer to actual war every minute, they felt.

The boys found a row of S.P.A.D. machines not far distant. The "Spads," as the aviators called them, were fleet biplanes. They found a genial airman to tell them something of the planes, which he described as the latest type of French fighting aeroplane. "This sort has less wing surface than any machine we have had here," said the airman. "It is mighty fast. These four have just come back from a good pull of work. I think this lot were all that is left of two dozen that were attached to the B squadron just before the last big push."

"Cheerful beggar!" spoke up another pilot within earshot. "Are you trying to impress a bunch of newcomers?" He walked toward the boys.

"Are you not some of the crowd that got in last night?"

"Yes," answered Bob Haines. "We're the Brighton Academy bunch. We have just come over from home."

"Do you know a fellow called Corwin?"

"I am Corwin," said Harry.

"My name is Thompson. Your brother Will was over here last week looking for you, and told me that if I was still here when you arrived I was to look you up. He may not get a chance to run over again for a bit. He is some distance away."

Harry was delighted. He introduced his companions to Thompson, who told them Will Corwin was fit and well, and had become quite famous as a flyer. Thompson promised to dine at their mess that evening.

He did so, and after dinner sat and chatted about flying in general, telling the Brighton boys many things strange to them about the development of the flying service since the beginning of the war.

"I was in England in August, 1914, when the war broke out," Thompson said. "I had been interested for some time in flying; had learned to fly a machine myself, and had watched most of the big international flying meets. I knew some of the rudimentary points about aircraft, and as I had a cousin who was in the motor manufacturing business in England, I had been put fairly into touch with aeroplane engines.

I don't know how much is known at home about what the French and British flying corps have done out here, but to get a fair idea of what they have accomplished one has to know something of the way both France and England were caught napping. I think it is fair to say that there was not one firm in all Great Britain at the outbreak of hostilities which had proven that it could turn out a successful aeroplane engine.

"The English War Department had what they called the Royal Aircraft Factory, where some experimental work was done, but the day war was declared the British Army had less than one hundred serviceable flying machines of all types. What proved to be the most useful plane used by the British for the first year of the war was only a blueprint when the fighting started. France was better off.

She had factories that could make aero engines. But as to actual planes, three hundred would be an outside figure of the number with which France went to war.

"The use of the aeroplane in war was a subject which gave much discussion, but few people, even in the army, thought that the aeroplane would be of great service except for scouting. At the airdrome where I learned to fly we used to practice dropping bombs---imaginary ones, of course---but we were so inaccurate at it that none of us imagined we would be of much use in that direction in actual warfare. I have heard it said that the Germans directed their artillery by signals dropped from aircraft at the very beginning. They did so before they had fought many weeks, anyway.

Boche fliers, English gunners have told me, used to hover over battery positions and drop long colored streamers and odd showers of colored lights. It was some time before the Allied airman contributed much to the value of the Allied gunfire. When they got at it, they beat the Huns at their own game, for the war had not been on many months before British planes were flying over Boche batteries and sending back wireless messages from wireless telegraph installations on the machines themselves.

"The Boches had lots more machines than the Allies, and their army command had apparently worked out plans about using them which were new to our side. I saw some of the early war-work of the British fliers, for I got into the Army Service Corps, the transport service, and came out to the front early in 1915. I did not get transferred into the flying part of the business until the end of that year.

There is no question but that the quality of the British flying men was what put them ahead of the Germans long before they were equal mechanically. The French, too, are really great fliers. The Boches try hard, and are certainly brave enough, but there is something in the Boche makeup that makes him bound to be second-best to our lot.

I have heard lots of discussions on the subject, and I think those who argue that the Boche lacks an element of sportsmanship just about hit the weak point in his armor as regards flying.

"The flying game has been one long succession of discarding the machines we thought best at one time. That applies to the Germans as much as it does to us. One has to go back to the start to realize how much flying has progressed. First, engine construction is another thing to-day. They can make engines in England now, though they were a long time getting to the point where they could do it. I believe that most all the best motor factories in England have learned to turn out good flying engines by now. It means a lot of difference to produce a machine that can do sixty miles an hour and one that can do two miles a minute. Yet at the start mighty few aeroplanes could beat sixty miles an hour, and to-day I can show you plenty of planes right here in this 'drome which can do one hundred and twenty. If a plane cannot do two miles a minute nowadays it is pretty sure to meet something in enemy hands that can do so. Why, before long one hundred and twenty may be too slow.

"Then look at alt.i.tudes! When I first thought of flying, five thousand feet up was big. That was not so very long ago. Before the war some very specially built machines, no good for general work, had been coaxed up to about fifteen thousand feet by some crack airman, who had worked for hours to do it, but the best machine we had at the 'drome where I learned flying would only do six thousand, and no one could get her up there under forty minutes. She was a fine machine, too, as machines went in those days. To-day it is no exaggeration to say that ten thousand feet above the earth is low to a flier.

Everyone goes to twenty thousand continually, and many of the biggest fights take place from seventeen thousand to twenty thousand feet up.

"The character of the work we have to do has changed as much as the machines have changed. First, anti-aircraft guns---'Archies,'

we call them---have improved enormously. In the first of the show the airman merely had to keep five thousand feet up and no Archie could touch him. A French friend of mine told me the other day that one of their anti-aircraft guns. .h.i.t a flier at a height of fifteen thousand feet. The gun was firing from an even greater distance than that across country, too. The very fact that flying at considerable height protected aircraft when scouting produced scientific methods into the collection of information.

"The camera work that has been evolved in this war is little short of wonderful. When it was realized that the planes could get photographs from a height that was out of reach of the Archies of those days, fighting one aeroplane with another came next. Fights in the air, instead of being rare, became the daily routine. I doubt if any of the planes that began the war game in 1914 were armed with rapid-fire guns. The aviators carried automatic pistols or rifles. Some carried ordinary service revolvers.

"With the introduction of the actual air fighting as a part of the scheme of things, three distinct jobs were developed. First, the reconnaissances, which the scouts had to make daily. Next, the artillery observers, whose work it was to direct our gun-fire. Next, the fighters, pure and simple. Another job was bombing, but we have not had as much of that as of the other branches of the work.

"With the coming of the new element---the fighting planes, which went out with the sole idea of individual combat---came the necessity for swifter planes, for the man on the fastest machine has the great advantage in the air. The latest development is along the line of team-work in attack. So it goes on changing. I think the smaller, speedier aeroplanes are becoming harder to manage, but we do things now we never dreamed of doing a year ago. All of us can fly now as we never thought before the war it would be possible to fly.

"Instead of rifles and pistols in the hands of the aviators every plane now has at least one rapid-fire gun, and some have two and even three. The position of the rapid-fire gun on an aeroplane has a lot to do with the success or failure of a fight in the air. All of you want to study that question carefully.

"But most fascinating of all to the new airman at the front is the actual handling of the machines when fighting. There lies the greatest progress of all. Construction has made big strides, but fliers have made bigger ones. Wait till you get up front and see."

CHAPTER V

JIMMY HILL STARTLES THE VETERANS