Chapter 5

Having been set right about my course, I pushed my biplane to more level ground, with the willing help of all the boys, started my motor, and was away again. Their shrill cheers reached me even above the roar of the motor. As a lad in a small, Middle-Western town, I have known the rapture of holding to a balloon guy-rope at a county fair, until "the world's most famous aeronaut" shouted, "Let 'er go, boys!" and swung off into space. I kept his memory green until I had passed the first age of hero worship. I know that every youngster in a small village in central France will so keep mine. Such fame is the only kind worth having.

A flight of fifteen minutes brought me within sight of the large white circle which marks the landing-field at R----. J. B. had not yet arrived. This was a great disappointment, for we had planned a race home. I was anxious about him, too, knowing that the godfather of all adventurers can be very stern at times, particularly with his aerial godchildren. I waited for an hour and then decided to go on alone. The weather having cleared, the opportunity was too favorable to be lost. The cloud formations were the most remarkable that I had ever seen. I flew around and over and under them, watching at close hand the play of light and shade over their great, billowing folds. Sometimes I skirted them so closely that the current of air from my propeller raveled out fragments of shining vapor, which streamed into the clear spaces like wisps of filmy silk. I knew that I ought to be savoring this experience, but for some reason I couldn't. One usually pays for a fine mood by a sudden and unaccountable change of feeling which shades off into a kind of dull, colorless depression.

I passed a twin-motor Caudron going in the opposite direction. It was fantastically painted, the wings a bright yellow and the circular hoods, over the two motors, a fiery red. As it approached, it looked like some prehistoric bird with great ravenous eyes. The thing startled me, not so much because of its weird appearance as by the mere fact of its being there. Strangely enough, for a moment it seemed impossible that I should meet another _avion_. Despite a long apprenticeship in aviation, in these days when one's mind has only begun to grasp the fact that the mastery of the air has been accomplished, the sudden presentation of a bit of evidence sometimes shocks it into a moment of amazement bordering upon incredulity.

As I watched the big biplane pass, I was conscious of a feeling of loneliness. I remembered what J. B. had said that morning. There _was_ something unpleasant in the isolation; it made us look longingly down to earth, wondering whether we shall ever feel really at home in the air. I, too, longed for the sound of human voices, and all that I heard was the roar of the motor and the swish of the wind through wires and struts, sounds which have no human quality in them, and are no more companionable than the lapping of the waves to a man adrift on a raft in mid-ocean. Underlying this feeling, and no doubt in part responsible for it, was the knowledge of the fallibility of that seemingly perfect mechanism which rode so steadily through the air; of the quick response that ingenious arrangement of inanimate matter would make to an eternal and inexorable law if a few frail wires should part; of the equally quick, but less phlegmatic response of another fallible mechanism, capable of registering horror, capable--it is said--of passing its past life in review in the space of a few seconds, and then--capable of becoming equally inanimate matter.

Luckily nothing of this sort happened, and the feeling of loneliness passed the moment I came in sight of the long rows of barracks, the hangars and machine shops of the aviation school. My joy when I saw them can only be appreciated in full by fellow aviators who remember the end of their own first long flight. I had been away for years. I would not have been surprised to find great changes. If the brevet monitor had come hobbling out to meet me holding an ear trumpet in his withered hand, the sight would have been quite in keeping with my own sense of the lapse of time. However, he approached with his ancient springy, businesslike step, as I climbed down from my machine. I swallowed to clear the passage to my ears, and heard him say, "Alors ça va?" in a most disappointingly perfunctory tone of voice.

I nodded.

"Where's your biograph?"

My biograph! It is the altitude-registering instrument which also marks, on a cross-lined chart, the time consumed on each lap of an aerial voyage. My card should have shown four neat outlines in ink, something like this--

one for each stage of my journey, including the forced landing when I had lost my way. But having started the mechanism going upon leaving A----, I had then forgotten all about it, so that it had gone on running while my machine was on the ground as well as during the time it was in the air. The result was a sketch of a magnificent mountain range which might have been drawn by the futurist son, aged five, of a futurist artist. Silently I handed over the instrument. The monitor looked at it, and then at me without comment. But there is an international language of facial expression, and his said, unmistakably, "You poor, simple prune! You choice sample of mouldy American cheese!"

J. B. didn't return until the following afternoon. After leaving me over C----, he had blown out two spark-plugs. For a while he limped along on six cylinders, and then landed in a field three kilometres from the nearest town. His French, which is worse, if that is possible, than mine, aroused the suspicions of a patriot farmer, who collared him as a possible German spy. Under a bodyguard of two peasants, armed with hoes, he was marched to a neighboring château. And then, I should have thought, he would have had another historical illusion,--this time with a French Revolutionary setting. He says not, however. All his faculties were concentrated in enjoying this unusual adventure; and he was wondering what the outcome of it would be. At the château he met a fine old gentleman who spoke English with that nicety of utterance which only a cultivated Frenchman can achieve. He had no difficulty in clearing himself. Then he had dinner in a hall hung with armor and hunting trophies, was shown to a chamber half as large as the lounge at the Harvard Club, and slept in a bed which he got into by means of a ladder of carved oak. This is a mere outline. Out of regard for J. B.'s opinions about the sanctities of his own personal adventures, I refrain from giving further details.

These were the usual experiences which every American pilot has had while on his brevet flights. As I write I think of scores of others, for they were of almost daily occurrence.

Jackson landed--unintentionally, of course--in a town square and was banqueted by the Mayor, although he had nearly run him down a few hours earlier, and had ruined forever his reputation as a man of dignified bearing. But the Mayor was not alone in his forced display of unseemly haste. Many other townspeople, long past the nimbleness of youth, rushed for shelter; and pride goeth before a collision with a wayward aeroplane. Jackson said the sky rained hats, market baskets, and wooden shoes for five minutes after his Blériot had come to rest on the steps of the _bureau de poste_. And no one was hurt.

Murphy's defective motor provided him with the names and addresses of every possible and impossible _marraine_ in the town of Y----, near which he was compelled to land. While waiting for the arrival of his mechanician with a new supply of spark-plugs, he left his monoplane in a field close by. A path to the place was worn by the feet of the young women of the town, whose dearest wish appeared to be to have an aviator as a _filleul_. They covered the wings of his _avion_ with messages in pencil. The least pointed of these hints were, "Écrivez le plus tôt possible"; and, "Je voudrais bien un filleul américain, très gentil, comme vous."

Matthews' biplane crashed through the roof of a camp bakery. If he had practiced this unusual _atterrissage_ a thousand times he could not have done it so neatly as at the first attempt. He followed the motor through to the kitchen and finally hung suspended a few feet from the ceiling. The army bread-bakers stared up at him with faces as white as fear and flour could make them. The commandant of the camp rushed in. He asked, "What have you done with the corpse?" The bread-bakers pointed to Matthews, who apologized for his bad choice of landing-ground. He was hardly scratched.

Mac lost his way in the clouds and landed near a small village for gasoline and information. The information he had easily, but gasoline was scarce. After laborious search through several neighboring villages he found a supply and had it carried to the field where his machine was waiting. Some farmer lads agreed to hold on to the tail while Mac started the engine. At the first roar of the rotary motor they all let loose. The Blériot pushed Mac contemptuously aside, lifted its tail and rushed away. He followed it over a level tract of country miles in extent, and found it at last in a ditch, nose down, tail in air, like a duck hunting bugs in the mud. This story loses nine tenths of its interest for want of Mac's pungent method of telling it.

One of the _bona-fide_ godchildren of Chance was Millard. The circumstances leading to his engagement in the French service as a member of the Franco-American Corps proves this. Millard was a real human being,--he had no grammar, no polish, no razor, safety or otherwise, but likewise no pretense, no "swank." He was _persona non grata_ to a few, but the great majority liked him very much, although they wondered how in the name of all that is curious he had ever decided to join the French air service. Once he told us his history at great length. He had been a scout in the Philippine service of the American army. He had been a roustabout on cattle boats. He had boiled his coffee down by the stockyards in every sizable town on every transcontinental railroad in America. In the spring of 1916 he had employment with a roofing company which had contracted for a job in Richmond, Virginia, I think it was. But Richmond went "dry" in the State elections; the roofing job fell through, owing, so Millard insisted, to the natural and inevitable depression which follows a dry election. Having lost his prospective employment as a roofer, what more natural than that he should turn to this other high calling?

He was game. He tried hard and at last reached his brevet tests. Three times he started off on triangles. No one expected to see him return, but he surprised them every time. He could never find the towns where he was supposed to land, so he would keep on going till his gas gave out. Then his machine would come down of itself, and Millard would crawl out from under the wreckage and come back by train.

"I don't know," he would say doubtfully, rubbing his eight-days' growth of beard; "I'm seeing a lot of France, but this coming-down business ain't what it's cracked up to be. I can swing in on the rods of a box car with the train going hell bent for election, but I guess I'm too old to learn to fly."

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 altitude tests and were then no longer _élèves-pilotes_, but _pilotes aviateurs_. By reason of this distinction we passed from the rank of soldier of the second class 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 apprenticeship and enters into the dignity of a brevetted military pilot.

* * * * *

Six months have passed 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 circumstances 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 République, 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 pass 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 passed 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-passenger 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 chasse_, we eventually followed the usual course of training for such pilots. We passed 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 surpassed, 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 Massachusetts 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 fashion, 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 gratitude.

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 dépôt 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 ship. 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 ship a mixture of tar and stale cooking. But let it pass. 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 passageway 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 Hélène," 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 accumulations 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 shell 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 café 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 café, made pointed remarks as they passed, 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 _éclatements_.

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