Part 16

The aeroplane could be used also as a link for communicating with armies and their staffs, particularly in the case of a besieged army or town. And, finally, the man-bird is admirable in the capacity of aerial policeman; he can watch the clouds and he can prevent the passage of the enemy pilots. Not that it is possible to suppose that one force of aeroplanes, however numerous, can completely occupy the heavens, for the skies are broad; but bold aviators ever on the watch, patrolling the sky in constant relays (as was the case in the aerial defence of Paris against the Zeppelins), will generally succeed, whatever measures are taken against them, in overtopping the adversary; and the French aviator is remarkably good in that sort of warfare where native audacity and resource are in demand--that is why the Frenchman is so superb a performer in the air. None the less it is impossible quite to bar out the enemy. The clouds may always hide a foe; the fog is ever the possible lurking ground of the hostile airship. But although the barrage system (so successfully applied on solid earth in the _tir de barrage_) cannot absolutely prevent a Zeppelin attack upon a wide-spreading town, yet the aerial dam has given good results in the war of the air. The procedure is to institute a barrage of aeroplanes over against a certain locality--a certain restricted space. The enemy is marked down and prevented from passing. Undesirable visitors are invited to "move on," and they do not wait for a repetition of the request! I have heard of one hardy airman who, charged to watch the heavens against the passage of the adversary, so manoeuvred that the thick heavy clouds which hung in the sky were positively useful to him as a screen. Noting that at one point there was a clear space in the dense curtain of fog, he placed himself there and watched as a look-out might in the embrasure of a fort. None came to challenge his vigilance.

Again the barrage tactics are extremely useful in the prevention of secrets being divulged to the enemy. Certain important movements, such as the moving up of reinforcements, are taking place in a certain part of the line, and to keep the enemy from knowledge of the fact _squadrillas_ of battle-planes are sent up to bar the way to the enemy scouts, and nothing can penetrate the screen of the _avions_. Thus it has so happened that, thanks to the barrage system, the enemy has been without definite news of the Allies' movements during twenty-four hours. But let it be remembered that the aerial dam implies the mastery of the air, as important to the Allies as the mastery of the seas: indeed, one could establish a very close analogy between the two. The mastery of the air--the complete mastery--would have meant the finish of the war, the absolute victory for that side which possessed it. And the aerial fleet must consist of aeroplanes, not Zeppelins. For after all the Zeppelins failed miserably either in their bombardment of England or their assault upon French towns. True they have taken toll of a certain number of innocent lives in England, but an infinitesimal number in comparison with the holocaust caused by a terrestrial bombardment. Cumbersome, unwieldy, unable to operate except in a fog, the Zeppelin was comparatively ineffectual as an engine of war, and would not have been employed by the Germans except to prevent the public exposure of a mistaken policy. Six aeroplanes could effect more damage than one Zeppelin, whose radius of action is circumscribed by the fact that it has to carry vast weight for a long journey, that it is expensive to build, and consumes immense quantities of fuel _en route_; that it is almost as dangerous to itself as to the enemy on account of its vulnerability from cannon and from high winds, and moreover it is constantly exposed to attack from the upper strata of air by the aeroplane which swoops down upon it with the speed of the eagle, and against which the Zeppelin has no defence. No, it is the aeroplane that has come to stay, and a very prominent airman--a man who bears a household name in aeronautics--declared to me that the side which could furnish ten thousand aeroplanes with the airmen to mount them would win the war. For if aerial bombardment had, up to that moment, taken very little place in the hostilities it was because it was on so small a scale. Very little effect was to be obtained by sending half a dozen apparati over a town--it is true that in some of the French raids over German towns there were as many as thirty machines employed, but this was the great exception. It is easy to conjure up the effect of a gigantic bombardment--a shower of metal from the sky--rained everywhere upon the enemy troops on the march, upon the enemy convoys in the rear, upon his stores and magazines, upon his bridges and railways. Such a bombardment, if it could be continued systematically for long enough, would mean his forced surrender, for retreat would not save him. His aerial foes would be always quicker than he, even his quickest motor transport, and would bombard him from the skies. So that the mastery of the sky would ensure the victory for any army.

The development of the aeroplane is full of the most startling possibilities. Already it has far outflown the vision of its inventors, for, a very short time ago it seems, one of the Voisin _freres_ declared to me that the aeroplane would never be other than a rich man's hobby, of little use in war-time other than the dropping of a few explosives. My informant has since trodden the path of so many brave pilots, but had he lived he would have admitted to-day that the possibilities of the aeroplane seem limitless. The appearance of the Sikorski machine in Russia carrying five or six men in its cabin encourages the belief that the aerobus will soon be a practical reality, and the imagination is fired by the prospect of the air humming with giant aeroplanes, which, by the way, the Germans also attempted to use during the war. There is more than a possibility--so many surprising things have happened--that, in the future, commanders will have aerial motor lorries at their disposal for the rapid transport of their troops. Thus strategy and the physiognomy of the fight would be completely changed. It would effect a complete metamorphosis. The commander who possessed this aerial fleet would be able to carry the whole of his army with the speed and ease of the magic carpet of the _Arabian Nights_ to some distant point and descend even into the enemy country. Nevertheless, as M. Blanchon in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ suggests, the General who resorted to these aerial methods could not carry out normal military operations for the reason that his _materiel_ must go by road. But when the science of air-transport is sufficiently advanced to allow armies to pass in the sky, presumedly that army will know how to take care of its lines of communication.

These are dreams of the future, however, and their realisation is problematical. But the vision which is in no wise uncertain--the vision which will be realised in the near future, is that of vast armies of wings gathered in the sky. Nations will no longer possess fleets of hundreds of aeroplanes, but tens of thousands will lie in readiness to skim into enemy country and scatter terror and death over vast areas. The nations that plunge into war will no longer pledge only their fighting men; they will enter into battle knowing that their women and children must also endure the worst agony of horror, for modern science has destroyed civilised warfare, and modern man has joined hands with primitive man and wars upon the innocent and helpless.

But it must be conceded that superiority in the machines should be accompanied by superiority in pilots. In a conversation which I had at the time of writing this chapter with M. Louis Bleriot (who knows as much as any man living of the practical side of aviation and even its scientific side), the famous winner of the cross-Channel prize confessed that France had not sufficiently developed her rich treasure in expert and adventurous men--the very pick of the pilots of the world--though the English, too, were extraordinary for their _sang-froid_ and were remarkable airmen. For in the air as on the land, in the last resort, it is the personal element which tells. A school, urged Bleriot, was necessary to form such super-pilots as Garros and Pegoud, men renowned for ever for their prowess in the air.

For the conquest of the air is to the swift and strong and fearless. Prudence and sagacity, and the slow measured wisdom that comes with the years, play no part in so breathless a pursuit. It is a game for young gods, not for the pale _savant_; a sport for young eagles, for a man must be sharp of eye, strong of claw and sinews to cleave his way through the clouds, right into the face of day. These super-men who ride fearlessly amongst the stars must be the very pick of humanity, revelling in the sensations of supreme danger, glorying in the knowledge that in a few seconds an assailant may emerge from yonder cloud with whom he must come into death grapples, and well aware that the vanquished will crash down thousands of feet to earth. Youth: youth has been poured out with a lavish hand on the smoking, bloody altar of the war. Youth: there is no incense more precious to the gods. Alas! a monstrous sort of selection is exercised. The young are mowed down by Death with the scythe, leaving the least adventurous, the timid and calculating--those who are sure eventually to die of a cold in the head--to live on.

Very curious is the psychology of the airman. He is billeted so often in the midst of the world in some pleasant little town away behind the lines--it may be even Paris; sometimes also Fate sends him to a chateau where he lives like a prince amid ancestral halls and a sweeping park--until the day when duty calls him to mount the perilous stairway of the skies to give mortal combat to the enemy. In the trenches men welcome an attack as a relief from the deadly monotony of life in pits, but the airman leaves an easeful, agreeable, social life for the cold, austere atmosphere of the skies under the pure radiant dome of heaven. It requires a man of special temperament to withstand so lively a contrast--not to be softened or unnerved by it. Think of the solitude of the upper air, careering absolutely alone, perhaps. And there is no turning back. There is no such word as "funk" in the bright lexicon of the airman. He is up there because he is fearless, because he does not dread being solus in the wide heavens, because he is a man and no craven, because he has nerves of steel and whipcord. And he must be ready to fight with any weapons. Garros was equally expert in attacking and bringing down his man with machine-gun, carbine, rifle, or even revolver, and in ten days before he was captured he had "grassed" three German aeroplanes. One of the men who fell into his hands having asked him to announce his capture to the German lines, Garros started off in that spirit of chivalry common amongst airmen. There is this delightful about the new arm, it has given a touch of romance to the drab horror of the war. Whenever a man was captured or killed, airmen from the opposite camp dropped a letter informing the comrades of the victim, often with an added word of praise. "Even the Germans are gentlemen in the air," remarked a young pilot the other day. There is chivalry in the air. The man with his head near the stars, flying in immeasurable space, has no room for littlenesses. His heart is large and splendid like the splendour of his deeds--deeds that make the exploits of the old heroes pale into insignificance. They are the phenomenal fruit of a limitless audacity, of a glorious and spring-like youth, of the heyday of existence, when danger is the mad intoxicant, the heady draught that puts brightness into the eye, that gives a riotous pleasure to life, that is like song and wine to the hero clad in the shining and invincible armour of his own superlative freshness and illusions.

The bodies that crash down from the heavens and the souls that soar into the white radiance of Eternity have known no petty thought, have perpetrated no mean deed. Yes, there is chivalry in the Air.

*CHAPTER XX*

*THE POILU'S HOSPITAL*

There is this wonderful and alluring in France, that, recognising the faults in an administration or department of the public service, she sets to work immediately to effect reform. And it was clear enough that the _service de sante_, or hospital service, was grievously defective at the outbreak of the war. It was a question that had never been properly worked out. Those who had thought about the subject at all, never supposed that the demands upon the department would be so terrific. Probably they thought, as did most Frenchmen, that the war would be of quick duration and that--well--the inconveniences of the system would be but temporary, and one would do the best one could in so short a time. But the actual facts were to give the lie to this prevision as to many others. The war lasted long, the demands upon the hospital were not only terrific but protracted. But with the spirit of adaptability, of which the French have given so many proofs during the war, they set to work with the resolution to do the best possible. Little by little the gross defects of the earlier days were remedied; the number of doctors, which at the beginning had been hopelessly inadequate, was augmented, and immense improvements were made in the organisation of the hospital trains. Thereupon the evacuation of the wounded developed on scientifically humane lines, in spite of the difficulties of an unexpected kind, mainly brought about by the colossal character of the war. Thus the wounded rapidly received attention in the ambulances and were quickly sent away in trains and motor-cars, and reached the most distant parts of France not later than the morrow of the combat. I was at Biarritz when the Champagne offensive was taking place, and saw arrive at the station wounded men, still powdered with the dust of the trenches, who had been in the fight twenty-four hours before.

The hospitals, however, even the most modern in their equipment, did not equal the English, still less the American, but the reason was not far to seek: a lack of money. A great many "sanitary formations" (as they are called in France) suffered also from a want of motors; in fact the French, by the very nature of the circumstances, had not the immense resources that the English possess. English newspapers raised immense sums for the care of the sick. But if the French had not the money to devote to the niceties of hospital installation they did the best they could with the time and means at their disposal. And although, perhaps, the hospitals were not as clean as would satisfy English tastes, they served their purpose, which was to restore as many men as possible to the firing-line and alleviate suffering.

Eternally to their credit is the manner in which the French resolutely set their house in order after the failure of the system was revealed on the field of battle. It must be remembered that the long duration of battles nowadays prevents the wounded from being removed at once, and often they have to remain the whole of the day where they have fallen until the night comes and they can be transported. Naturally it is of high importance in the saving of life that the wounded should be got away as quickly as possible to avoid the setting in of gangrene.

The Committee, which was formed by M. Millerand at the Ministry of War in the early days of hostilities, to effect reforms in the army medical service, fixed the number of sixty motor-cars per army corps. This number was in direct relation with the accommodation of the hospital trains. But when the war took on the character of a war of manoeuvres it became necessary to employ trains used for ammunition and even for food supply--returning empty to their base--for the evacuation of the wounded. In a general fashion it may be said that the great preoccupation of the military command is to transport the wounded away from the scene of action as rapidly as possible in order to remain unhampered. One could draw a melancholy picture of the first victims of the war and its shambles being sent right across France in crawling trains--the word is applicable in a double sense, a long-drawn-out agony--before the arrival at the base hospital. Never shall I forget the first trainful of British wounded I encountered coming from Mons. The goods train, without seats, benches or beds, crawled and jolted by, passing my train going in the opposite direction. We shouted words of cheer, to which many of the Tommies replied, gaily enough. Some even jumped off the creeping train to pick up the fruit we threw (one fellow, I remember, with a bandaged leg, hopped on one foot in the permanent way, determined not to lose a pear that had fallen there). But others, again, made no reply, and we hushed our voices and bowed our heads as we saw recumbent figures, stretched in cattle trucks on bundles of straw, figures that gave no sign. Would they ever speak again, these men lying alone, untended, in the creaking, jarring train? But these terrible conditions were quickly changed. At the beginning of the war there were only five regular hospital trains provided with beds for the wounded, and a hundred improvised trains, formed to a large extent of the rolling stock of goods trains. The wounded could not be properly attended in such trains, because there was a lack of communication between the different parts, but afterwards, corridor trains were adopted almost exclusively. Nevertheless the number of the wounded was so great, after some of the battles, that every sort of train possible and imaginable had to be pressed into the service. But the Committee, by its wise and careful dispositions, rendered a great service in providing train accommodation for sixty thousand wounded to which the Minister of War added twenty thousand; and which again, I believe, was considerably increased by General Gallieni during his brief but strenuous period at the Ministry of War.

As originally conceived the ambulance of the Front was equipped for major operations as well as the hospital in the rear, but afterwards it was found inadvisable to perform operations in these conditions where the surgeon had not the time or the tranquillity of mind necessary for the purpose; and so by a later arrangement the hospitals for the major operations were placed fifteen or twenty miles to the rear. And so it happened that the first mistakes were rectified. Instead of great and important operations being conducted on the field of battle, subject to the dangers and interruptions from such a propinquity, the more gravely wounded, whose state required amputation, were rapidly transported to these hospitals in the rear after their wounds had been attended to in the first place, and an examination made in the field hospital, or ambulances as they are called in France. This system gave much better results than that adopted in the beginning, whereby the _ambulances de l'avant_ (or advanced ambulances) and the reserve ambulances, the divisional ambulances, and the army ambulances, were interchangeable. They were intended to serve for all the purposes of attending to the wounded. They were used either as a place of temporary relief for the wounded or took on a _quasi_ permanent character according to the necessities of the case. When the advanced ambulances in certain circumstances became stationary, the reserve ambulances followed the army on the march. It seemed in many respects an excellent system, and certainly was very supple and ingenious, for these ambulances became interchangeable; but they possessed the inconvenience, to which I have already alluded--that is to say, the proper sort of attention could not be given to the important cases. Hence the change that the Committee brought about, whereby the _grands blesses_ were transported to the hospital at the rear, where the necessary skill and the instruments required were at their disposal. The present system works in this manner. The battle takes place. The chief medical officer fixes the spot in the rear where the formation ought to be established. The formation establishes itself there in a couple of hours with its motor-cars. An hour after, it has pitched its first tent and is ready to shelter the first wounded which come to it from the ambulances, perhaps in the space of three or four hours. Instruments sterilised in advance permit the surgeons to commence to operate three hours after having received their orders to establish the hospital tent. Other tents can be established to the number of five. A hundred wounded persons can thus be taken care of and treated in the open country. Reserve ambulances can be called upon in case of need. As soon as operated upon, and out of immediate danger, the wounded, in the majority of cases, can be evacuated to permanent hospitals further back in the rear.

In case of retreat, the formation, if warned in time, falls back carrying with it if possible all the wounded and follows the troops. These tent hospitals carry with them the wherewithal to instal an operating theatre and a _section d'hospitalisation_, composed of a hundred beds, five double-walled tents, and the necessary doctors and male attendants. Of course the problem of removing the wounded from these tent hospitals at the Front is always a grave one. When the war took on the character of a siege war, a train acted as a sort of shuttle from the field ambulances to the station where the "army zone" finished and the "interior zone" began. The two were generally seventy or eighty miles apart. Here the wounded were carried to the other train, where the cases were sorted out and sent to the distant base hospitals. But, as I have said, the tendency was to keep the slight cases as near as possible to the lines, and send only to distant parts either medical cases--infectious diseases, and convalescents--or the more serious surgical cases, which were entering upon a secondary phase.

One of the most interesting aspects of the question of the treatment and recovery of the wounded was the utilisation of the mineral waters which exist in such abundance in France, particularly in the Pyrenees; and all the well-known stations of this delightful region were filled with soldiers recovering from their wounds or illnesses incurred in the service of the country. Magnificent results were obtained also by the same means in '70. Strongly impregnated sulphur waters gave then, as they have given during this second war, most admirable results, particularly in combating the infection of wounds caused by fire-arms. It is not necessary to insist upon the dreadful error of the theory that bullet wounds were clean wounds. Before it was discovered that the bullet infected the surrounding tissue much harm had been done. The mineral waters were also invaluable in the treatment of nervous affections arising from wounds and rheumatism contracted in the trenches. Some really remarkable recoveries have been made in this glorious region irradiated by the sun and full of pure air charged with the balsamic odours of a pine-clad district.