For an hour after his return he was very happy. He had won
his first victory, always the hardest to gain, and had been complimented by the
commandant, by Lieutenant Nungesser, the Roi des Aces, and by other French and
American pilots. There is no petty jealousy among airmen, and in our group the
e'sprit de corps is unusually fine. Rivalry is keen, but each squadron takes
almost as much pride in the work of the other squadrons as it does in its own.
The details of the result were horrible. The Albatross broke
up two thousand metres from the ground, one wing falling within the French
lines. Drew knew what it meant to be wounded and falling out of control. But
his Spad held together. He had a chance for his life. Supposing the German to
have been merely woundedAn airman's joy in victory is a short-lived one.
Nevertheless, a curious change takes place in his attitude
toward his work, as the months pass. I can best describe it in terms of Drew's
experience and my own. We came to the front feeling deeply sorry for ourselves,
and for all airmen of whatever nationality, whose lives were to be snuffed out
in their promising beginnings. I used to play "The Minstrel Boy to the War Has
Gone" on a tin flute, and Drew wrote poetry. While we were waiting for our
first machine, he composed "The Airman's Rendezvous," written in the manner of
Alan Seeger's poem.
"And I in the wide fields of air Must keep with him
my rendezvous. It may be I shall meet him there When clouds, like sheep, move
slowly through The pathless meadows of the sky And their cool shadows go
beneath, I have a rendezvous with Death Some summer noon of white and
blue."
There is more of it, in the same manner, all of
which he read me in a husky voice. I, too, was ready to weep at our untimely
fate. The strange thing is that his prophecy came so very near being true. He
had the first draft of the poem in his breast-pocket when wounded, and has kept
the gory relic to remind himnot that he needs reminding of the
airy manner in which he canceled what ought to have been a bona-fide
appointment.
I do not mean to reflect in any way upon Alan
Seeger's beautiful poem. Who can doubt that it is a sincere, as well as a
perfect, expression of a mood common to all young soldiers? Drew was just as
sincere in writing his verses, and I put all the feeling I could into my
tin-whistle interpretation of "The Minstrel Boy." What I want to make clear is,
that a soldier's moods of self-pity are fleeting ones, and if he lives, he
outgrows them.
Imagination is an especial curse to an airman,
particularly if it takes a gloomy or morbid turn. We used to write "To whom it
may concern" letters before going out on patrol, in which we left directions
for the notification of our relatives and the disposal of our personal effects
in case of death. Then we would climb into our machines thinking, "This may be
our last sortie. We may be dead in an hour, in half an hour, in twenty
minutes." We planned splendidly spectacular ways in which we were to be brought
down, always omitting one, however, the most horrible as well as the most
common, in flames. Thank Fortune, we have outgrown this second and
belated period of adolescence and can now take a healthy interest in our work.
Now, an inevitable part of the daily routine is
to be shelled, persistently, methodically, and often accurately shelled. Our
interest in this may, I suppose, be called healthy, inasmuch as it would be
decidedly unhealthy to become indifferent to the activities of the German
antiaircraft gunners. It would be far-fetched to say that any airman ever looks
forward zestfully to the business of being shot at with one hundred and fives;
and seventy-fives, if they are well placed, are unpleasant enough. After one
hundred hours of it, we have learned to assume that attitude of contemptuous
toleration which is the manner common to all pilotes de chasse. We know
that the chances of a direct hit are almost negligible, and that we have all
the blue dome of the heavens in which to maneuver.
Furthermore, we have learned many little tricks by means of
which we can keep the gunners guessing. By way of illustration, we are
patrolling, let us say, at thirty-five hundred metres, crossing and recrossing
the lines, following the patrol leader, who has his motor throttled down so
that we may keep well in formation. The guns may be silent for the moment, but
we know well enough what the gunners are doing. We know exactly where some of
the batteries are, and the approximate location of all of them along the
sector; and we know, from earlier experience, when we come within range of each
individual battery. Presently one of them begins firing in bursts of four
shells. If their first estimate of our range has been an accurate one, if they
place them uncomfortably close, so that we can hear, all too well, above the
roar of our motors, the rending Gr-r-rOW, Gr-r-rOW, of the shells as
they explode, we sail calmly to all outward appearances on,
maneuvering very little. The gunners, seeing that we are not disturbed, will
alter their ranges, four times out of five, which is exactly what we want them
to do.
The next bursts will be hundreds of metres
below or above us, whereupon we show signs of great uneasiness, and the
gunners, thinking they have our altitude, begin to fire like demons. We employ
our well-earned immunity in preparing for the next series of batteries, or in
thinking of the cost to Germany, at one hundred francs a shot, of all this
futile shelling. Drew, in particular, loves this cost-accounting business, and
I must admit that much pleasure may be had in it, after patrol.wtjThey rarely fire less than fifty shells at us during
a two-hour patrol. Making a low general average, the number is nearer one
hundred and fifty. On our present front, where aerial activity is fairly brisk
and the sector is a large one, three or four hundred shells are wasted upon us
often before we have been out an hour.
We have memories of all the good batteries from Flanders to
the Vosges Mountains. Battery after battery, we make their acquaintance along
the entire sector, wherever we go. Many of them, of course, are mobile, so that
we never lose the sport of searching for them. Only a few days ago we located
one of this kind which came into action in the open by the side of a road.
First we saw the flashes and then the shell-bursts in the same cadence.. We
tipped up and fired at him in bursts of twenty to thirty rounds, which is the
only way airmen have of passing the time of day with their friends, the enemy
anti-aircraft gunners, who ignore the art of camouflage.
But we can converse with them, after a fashion, even though
we do not know their exact position. It will be long before this chap-ter of my
journal is in print. Having given no indication of the date of writing, I may
say, without indiscretion, that we are again on the Champagne front. We have a
wholesome respect for one battery here, a respect it has justly earned by
shooting which is really remarkable. We talk of this battery, which is east of
Rheims and not far distant from Nogent l'Abbesse, and take professional pride
in keeping its gunners in ignorance of their fine marksmanship. We signal them
their bad shots which are better than the good ones of most of the
batteries on the sector by doing stunts, a barrel turn , a loop, two or
three turns of a vrille..
As for their good shots, they are often so very good that we
are forced into acrobacy of a wholly individual kind. Our avions have received
many scars from their shells. Between forty-five hundred and five thousand
metres, their bursts have been so close under us that we have been lifted by
the concussions and set down violently again at the bottom of the vacuum; and
this on a clear day when a chasse machine is almost invisible at that height,
and despite its speed of two hundred kilometres an hour. On a gray day, when we
are flying between twenty-five hundred and three thousand metres beneath a film
of cloud, they repay the honor we do them by our acrobatic turns. They bracket
us, put barrages between us and our own lines, give us more trouble than all
the other batteries on the sector combined.
For this reason it is all the more humiliating to be forced
to land with motor trouble, just at the moment when they are paying off some
old scores. This happened to Drew while I have been writing up my journal.
Coming out of a tonneau in answer to three coups from the battery, his
propeller stopped dead. By planing flatly (the wind was dead ahead, and the
area back of the first lines there is a wide one, crossed by many intersecting
lines of trenches) he got well over them and chose a field as level as a
billiard table for landing-ground. In the very center of it, however, there was
one post, a small worm-eaten thing, of the color of the dead grass around it.
He hit it, just as he was setting his Spad on the ground, the only post in a
field acres wide, and it tore a piece of fabric from one of his lower wings. No
doubt the crack battery has been given credit for disabling an enemy plane. The
honor , such as it is, belongs to our aerial godfather, among whose lesser
vices may be included that of practical joking.
The remnants of the post were immediately confiscated for
firewood by some poilus who were living in a dugout near by.
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