Part 4
I have finally finished the Monoplane School, which is the end of preliminary training. There remain spirals, etc., an altitude, and a few hundred miles of cross-country flying, before I can obtain my brevet militaire and have the glory of a pair of small gold wings, one on each side of my collar. After that I shall have seven days' leave (if I am lucky), followed by two or three weeks perfectionnement on the type of machine I shall fly at the front. If I smash nothing from now on, I shall have practically my choice of "zincs"--a monoplace de chasse, or anything in the bombing or observation lines. If I break once, I lose my chasse machine, and so on, down to the most prosaic type of heavy bomber. Only one compensation in this very wise but severe system--the worse the pilot, the safer the machine he finally flies.
In spite of all my hopes, I had the inevitable crash--and in the very last class of the school. Landing our Blériots is a rather delicate matter (especially to a beginner), and last week I had the relapse in landings which so few beginners escape, with the result that I crashed on my last flight of the morning. I felt pretty low about it, of course, but on the whole I was not sorry for the experience, which blew up a lot of false confidence and substituted therefor a new respect for my job and a renewed keenness to succeed. After that I did better than ever before, and made a more consistent type of landing.
Guynemer, the great French "Ace," has disappeared, and from accounts of the fight one fears that he is dead. What a loss to France and to the Allies! the end of a career of unparalleled romantic brilliancy. I shall never forget one evening in Paris last spring. I was sitting in the Café de la Paix, under the long awning that fronts the Boulevard des Capucines. All Paris was buzzing with Guynemer's mighty exploit of the day before--four German planes in one fight, two of them sent hurtling down in flames within sixty seconds. It took one back to the old days, and one foresaw that Guynemer would take his place with the legendary heroes of France, with Roland and Oliver, Archbishop Turpin, Saint Louis, and Charles Martel.
Presently I looked up. A man was standing in the aisle before me--a slender youth, rather, dressed in the black and silver uniform of a captain in the French Aviation. Delicately built, of middle height, with dark tired eyes set in a pale face, he had the look of a haggard boy who had crowded the experience of a lifetime into a score of years. The mouth was remarkable in so young a man--mobile and thin-lipped, expressing dauntless resolution. On his breast the particolored ribbons of his decorations formed three lines: Croix de Guerre, Médaille Militaire, Officer of the Legion of Honor, Cross of St. George, English Military Cross, and others too rare for recognition.
All about me there arose a murmur of excited interest; chairs were pushed back and tables moved as the crowd rose to its feet. Cynical Swiss waiters, with armloads of pink and green drinks, halted agape. A whisper, collective and distinct, passed along the terrace: "It is Guynemer!"
The day before, over the fiery lines, he had done battle for his life; and this evening, in the gay security of Paris, he received the homage of the people who adored him.
He had been looking for a table, but when it became no longer possible to ignore the stir, he raised his right hand in embarrassed salute and walked quickly into the café.
I spent my ten days' leave in a trip to Nice, and used up about half of it in getting there.
The trip south was a martyrdom--a long stifling ride to Paris, three days' wait there for a reserved place to Marseilles, a day and a night standing up in a corridor from Paris to Marseilles (had to give up my seat to an unfortunate woman with two youngsters), and twenty-three hours more in a corridor to get to Cannes. On the whole, the worst journey I recollect. No stops for meals, so we all nearly starved, till I finally obtained an armful of bottled beer and some sandwiches.
I sat down on a trunk in the corridor and nodded off to sleep, only to be awakened half an hour later by H---- F---- (S----'s cousin), who stole up with a gesture for silence, and pointed at me with a shake of his head and a broad grin. It must have been rather a rakish tableau. On the floor to my left were half a dozen empty bottles; on one end of the trunk I sat, heavy-eyed and half awake, and beside me, sound asleep, with her head on my shoulder, was a respectable, very attractive, and utterly unknown young woman! C'est la guerre! I motioned H---- away and promptly went to sleep again.
In Marseilles I had time for the Corniche, to see Monte Cristo's castle, and eat a bouillabaisse, which I cannot recommend without reserve. With an enormous floating population of sailors, shipping booming, and streets ablaze at night, Marseilles seems far away from the war, after the hushed gloom of nocturnal Paris.
The trials for my military brevet were by far the most interesting thing I have done in aviation. On finishing the sixty horse-power Blériot class, I was told that I would have to do my brevet work on a small Caudron biplane, as there were no Blériots available. A few short flights in the Caudron gave me confidence that I could handle it; so one rather cloudy morning the officer told me to make my official altitude--which is merely one hour's stay at heights of over seven thousand feet. I pulled on my great fur combination and fur-lined boots, adjusted mittens, helmet, and goggles, and stepped into my machine, number 2887, which the mechanic had been tuning up. "Coupe, plein gaz," he shouted, above the roar of a score of motors, and gave the stick half a dozen turns. Then, "Contact reduit"; and as I yelled back, "Contact reduit," after the old starting formula, he gave a quick half turn to the blades. Off she went with a roar, all ten cylinders hitting perfectly, so I motioned him to pull out the blocks from before the wheels. A quick rush and a turn headed me into the wind, and the next moment the starter's arm shot forward.
Old 2887 is a bully 'bus. I was off the ground and heading up in forty yards. It was rather an occasion for a beginner who had never before flown over twenty-five hundred feet. The little Caudrons, of course, are not high-powered, but she climbed splendidly. In ten minutes I was circling over the camp at thirty-eight hundred feet, and in twenty, I had reached six thousand, just under the roof of the clouds. There was only one blue hole through, so up this funnel I climbed in decreasing circles, till I finally burst out into the gorgeous upper sunlight. At eight thousand feet I began to float about in a world of utter celestial loneliness--dazzlingly pure sun, air like the water of a coral atoll, and beneath me a billowy sea of clouds, stretching away to infinity. Here and there, from the cloudy prairies, great fantastic mountain ranges reared themselves; foothills and long divides, vast snowy peaks, impalpable sisters of Orizaba or Chimborazo, and deep gorges, ever narrowing, widening, or deepening, across whose shadowy depths drove ribbons of thin gray mist.
Once, as I was sailing over a broad cañon, I saw, far off in the south, a dark moving dot, and knew with a sudden thrill that another man like myself, astride his gaunt buzzing bird, was exploring and marveling at this upper dream-world.
At last the hour was up. I shut off the motor and drove downward in a series of long easy glides. Going through the clouds, one loses all sense of balance and direction. It is bizarre and sometimes dangerous. You plunge out into the old gray world beneath, to find yourself in a nose-dive, or off on a wing, or upside down--it is all the same in a cloud.
The balance of the military trials consists in spirals, and so forth, and a lot of cross-country flying by map and compass. First you make two round trips to a place fifty miles away, and then two triangular trips of about one hundred and fifty miles each. It is very easy, if you keep your wits about you and have no hard luck. Roads, railroads, rivers, woods, and canals are the principal guides to follow; towns and cities you can only recognize by having counted their predecessors, unless there is some very prominent building, cathedral or factory. A road, from three thousand feet, shows as a very straight white line, occasionally making angular turns. A railroad is a dark gray line, always curving gently when it turns. Canals are ribbons of water, very straight, between twin lines of trees. And so on. You watch your compass, to check up the tend of roads and railroads, watch your altimeter and tachometer (which tells the speed of your engine), and above all watch always ahead for suitable landing fields, in case of motor trouble. The wind also must be borne in mind; its direction can be told from smoke. I was lucky and had no trouble at all.
At Nice I ran into many Americans, and there were a good many Britishers about, recovering from the recent severe fighting around Passchendaele. They are a quiet and agreeable lot--very interesting when they talk about their work, which is seldom.
One captain had strolled into some heavy fighting with no weapon but a heavy cane, and with this, walking astride of a deep narrow enemy trench, he had killed eight Germans! An Australian captain, with the rare ribbon of the V.C. on his breast, had gone into a crowded German dugout with one companion, who was wounded at the first exchange of bombs. Single-handed, he had bombed out the Boches, taken forty prisoners back single-handed, and returned to bring out his wounded brother officer. An epic feat!
III
FULL-FLEDGED
Soon after my stay at Nice I went for a month to the Combat and Acrobatic School of Pau, which completes the most dangerous of all the flying training. A wonderful experience--somersaults, barrel-turns, corkscrew dives, every conceivable aerial caper, and long flights daily: skimming the highest peaks of the Pyrenees at three hundred feet above the snow--trips to Biarritz and along the coast, flying ten feet above the waves, etc.
It is hard to say enough in praise of the school at Pau--the hundreds of splendid machines, the perfect discipline and efficiency, the food, the barracks, the courteous treatment of pilots by officers and instructors. We were twenty Americans, in a clean airy barrack, with an Annamite to make the beds and sweep up. The school covers an enormous area in the valley of the Gave, just under the Pyrenees, and is ideal for an aviation center so far as weather conditions go, its one drawback being that motor-trouble, out of range of the aerodromes, means almost inevitably a smash. All along the Gave they have the smallest fields and the highest hedges I ever saw. The climate is superb--like the foothill climate of California: cool nights, delicious days, wonderful dawns and sunsets.
They started us on the eighteen-metre machine, doing vertical spirals, which are quite a thrill at first. You go to a height of about three thousand feet, shut off the motor, tilt the machine till the wings are absolutely vertical, and pull the stick all the way back. When an aeroplane inclines laterally to over forty-five degrees, the controls become reversed--the rudder is then the elevator, and the elevator the rudder, so that, in a vertical spiral, the farther back you pull the stick, the tighter the spiral becomes. You are at the same time dropping and whirling in short circles. I once did five turns in losing a thousand feet of altitude--an unusual number, the monitor told me with satisfaction. Usually, one loses about three hundred feet to each turn, but on my first attempt, I lost twenty-one hundred feet in three fourths of a turn, because I did not pull back enough on the stick.
After the eighteen-metre spirals we were given a few rides on the fifteen-metre machine--very small, fast and powerful, but a delicious thing to handle in the air; and after left and right vertical spirals on this type, we went to the class of formation-flying, where one is supposed to learn flying in squadron formation, like wild geese. This is extremely valuable, but most men take this chance for joy-riding, as they have petrol for three hours, and are responsible to no one.
On my first day in this class I found no one at the rendezvous, so I rose to about four thousand feet, and headed at a hundred miles an hour for the coast. In thirty-five minutes I was over Biarritz, where my eyes fairly feasted on the salt water, sparkling blue, and foam-crested. I do not see how men can live long away from the sea and the mountains. My motor was running like a clock and as I was beginning to have perfect confidence in its performance, I came down in a long coast to the ground, and went rushing across country toward the mountains, skimming a yard up, across pastures, leaping vertically over high hedges of poplar trees, booming down the main streets of villages, and behaving like an idiot generally, from sheer intoxication of limitless speed and power.
In a few moments I was at the entrance of one of the huge gorges that pierce the Pyrenees--the sort of place up which the hosts of Charlemagne were guided by the White Stag: deep and black and winding, with an icy stream rushing down its depths. Why not? I gave her full gas and whizzed up between black walls of rock that magnified enormously the motor's snarl, up and up until there was snow beneath me and ahead I could see the sun gleaming on the gorgeous ragged peaks. Up and up, nine, ten, eleven thousand feet, and I was skimming the highest ridges that separate France and Spain. Imagine rising from a field in Los Angeles, and twenty-five minutes later flying over the two-mile-high ridges of Baldy and Sheep Mountain, swooping down to graze the snow, or bounding into the air with more speed and ease than any bird.
At last, as my time was nearly up, I headed back for Pau. A few minutes later, just as I sighted the pygmy groups of hangars, my motor gave forth a loud bang and a sheet of flame, and several chunks of metal tore whizzing through the aluminum hood. Automatically, I pulled at the lever which closes the gasoline flow and tilted the machine forward to keep my speed. Another bang, accompanied by black smoke. "Holy mackerel!" I thought; "this is the end of me! Let's see--in case of fire, shut off petrol, open throttle, and leave the spark on. Then go into a nose-dive."
Somehow you can't seem to get very excited at such moments,--everything seems inevitable,--good or bad luck. I nose-dived, came out at five thousand feet, killed my propeller, and was gratified to see, on looking behind, that there was no more smoke. Starting the motor was of course out of the question, as it would have promptly taken fire; so I shut off throttle and spark, struck an easy glide, and began an anxious search for a field. Most of them were no larger than postage-stamps, and I knew they were hedged by the beastly poplars, but at last I spotted a long one, in the direction of the wind, though not long enough to afford more than a bare chance of avoiding a crash. It was the only hope, at any rate; so down I coasted in glides and serpentines, jockeying to lose height just over the trees. As luck would have it, I was a few feet low and had to chance jumping the trees with none too much speed. The splendid stability of the Nieuport saved me from a wing-slip, and a moment later I landed with a bang in a ditch, breaking one wheel and stopping within ten yards of a formidable line of willows.
I crawled out of my seat and lay down in the long grass to rest, as my head ached villainously from the too rapid descent. Somehow I dozed off and was awakened by the friendly tongue of a huge Basque shepherd dog. His mistress, a pretty Spanish-speaking peasant girl, appeared a minute later, and her family were very decent to me. After some hot coffee with brandy, and a piece of goat cheese, I attended to the formalities and went back to camp.
After formation-flying we went to the acrobatic class or "Haute École du Ciel," where you are taught to put a machine through the wildest kinds of maneuvers. This is the most dangerous class in any aviation training in France--many excellent pilots, whose nerves or stomachs would not stand the acrobatics, rest in the little cemetery at Pau. Wonderful sport, though, if nature intended one for that sort of thing! The most dreaded thing one does is the spinning nose-dive, or vrille (gimlet), which formerly was thought invariably fatal. They have now discovered that the small, very strong machines will come out of it safely, if the rudder is put exactly in the middle and the stick pushed forward.
The instructor in this class was a very dandified lieutenant, in a Bond Street uniform, and wearing a monocle, who lay in a steamer-chair all day, gazing up into the sky at the antics of his pupils. Around him stood assistants with field-glasses, who watched the heavens anxiously, and would suddenly bark out, "Regardez, mon lieutenant--l'Américain Thompson en vrille." The lieutenant would then languidly look up at the machine pointed out (they are distinguished by broad stripes, or checker-boards, or colors), and, if the "type" up above had done well, would remark, "Pas mal, celui-là." If some unfortunate plunged into the ground and killed himself, the officer would rise gracefully from his chair, flick the dust from his sleeve, and call for the "Black Cat," his special "taxi." Jumping in with remarkable speed, he rose in a series of the most breakneck evolutions, and flew to the scene of the accident. In reality, his pose is the best in the world, as it keeps the pilots gonflés, that is, courageous and confident, as opposed to dégonflés, or scared and nervous.
I was watching all this from the ground, when a monitor unexpectedly called out, "Nordhoff, Nordhoff!"
"Present!" I yelled, as I ran toward him.
"You will take the checker-board," he ordered, "rise to twelve hundred metres, and do one vrille and two upside-down turns."
I admit that I had a slight sinking spell as I walked to the machine, a little thirteen-metre beauty. (Think of it, only thirteen square yards of supporting surface!) It was all right as soon as I was strapped in and had the motor going. Up we went, the "Bébé" climbing like a cat, at incredible speed, while I anxiously repeated, again and again, the instructions. Two turns of the field gave me my thirty-six hundred feet. This was no time to hesitate, so, as I reached the required spot, away from the sun, I shut off the motor, took a long breath, and pulled back a bit on the stick. Slower and slower she went, until I felt the rather sickening swaying that comes with a dangerous loss of speed. The moment had come. Gritting my teeth, I gave her all the left rudder and left stick, at the same moment pulling the stick all the way back. For an instant she seemed to hang motionless--then with unbelievable swiftness plunged whirling downwards. "Remember, keep your eyes inside--don't look out, whatever happens," I thought, while a great wind tore at my clothing and whistled through the wires. In a wink of time I had dropped six hundred feet: so I carefully put the rudder in the exact center, centered the stick, and pushed it gently forward. At once the motion grew steadier, the wind seemed to abate, and the next moment I dared to look out. It was over--I was in a steep glide, right side up, safe and sound. I had done a vrille and come out of it! A gorgeous sensation! I loved it, and queerly enough my first bewildered thought was, "M---- would adore that!"
Just to show the lieutenant that I was having a good time, I buzzed up again and did two more vrilles, looking out the whole time at the panorama of Pyrenees, villages, and river, whirling around with the most amazing rapidity. Not a thing for bilious or easily dizzy people though, as it means horses at the walk if you fail to do the right thing at exactly the right moment.
After the acrobatics, we went to classes in machine-gun shooting and combat-flying--very interesting and practical, but not to be talked about.
After Pau, I had forty-eight hours' leave in Paris, bought a few things I needed for the front, and was then sent to a place it is forbidden to mention, expecting soon to get to flying over the lines.
On New Year's morning, as it was snowing hard and there was no flying, I sat by a cozy fire, in the house of some English people. Curious thing, running into them here. They are of the tribe of English who wander over the face of the earth, and make England what she is. The man of the house is an expert on ----, and has pursued his unusual vocation in Cuba, Jamaica, Honduras, Guiana, "Portuguese East" and other parts of Africa, as well as in Ceylon and a few other places I forget. Here he is now, as expert for the French. His wife and seven children, who speak French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Zulu, I think, follow him everywhere, and are everywhere equally at home. I have tea with them after work, and, needless to say, they are a Godsend in this desolate place. Let us all pray that next New Year's day we shall be thanking God for a victorious peace and returning to civilian life, never to put on uniforms again. The finest uniform of all is the old civilian suit--brass buttons and gold braid to the contrary.
For this winter air-work, which is the coldest known occupation, I think, this is the way we dress. First, heavy flannels and woolen socks. Over that, a flannel shirt with sleeveless sweater on top, and uniform breeches and tunic. Boots and spiral puttees (very warm things, if not put on too tightly) go on next, and over all we pull on a great combination, or fur-lined "teddy-bear" suit--waterproof canvas outside. Over our boots we pull fur-lined leather flying boots, reaching half-way up to our knees. For head-gear, a fur-lined leather cap, and around the neck, several turns of gray muffler. A variety of mask and a pair of "triplex" goggles to protect one's face from the icy breeze. With all this, and heavy fur gloves, one can keep reasonably warm.
As the 16th of January was the first good flying day for some time, there was much activity. After lunch I went to the aerodrome just in time to see the combat patrol come swooping down. An excited crowd was gathered about the first machine in, and I learned that one of our best pilots had just been brought down by a German two-seater, and that H----, a nineteen-year-old American in our sister escadrille here, had promptly brought the Hun down. I was proud to think that an American had revenged our comrade. This makes H----'s second German within a week--a phenomenal record for a beginner. He is an unusual youngster, and handles a machine beautifully. He seems to have the mixture of dash, cold nerve, and caution which makes an "ace."
The German fell ten thousand feet directly over the trenches, but at the last moment managed to straighten out a bit and crashed two hundred yards inside his lines. H---- followed him down, and gliding over the trenches at one hundred feet, saw one German limp out of the wreck and wave a hand up at the victor.