SPOTTING
I was to be a lucky man in that there were few branches of the war in
which I did not have experience until a German bomb laid me low at
Baupaume. I not only got an opportunity to do my country service in the
air as a military observer, though it sent me on my first trip to a
hospital, but not so very long afterward had the wildest and possibly
more thrilling experience in command of one of his Majesty’s ground
“dreadnoughts”--the famous tanks.
Mind you, I wouldn’t paint myself as so brilliant and indispensable
generally that the aviation corps was trying to steal me from the
infantry and the special tank service from doing duty in the air.
But it is to be recalled that I was a trained soldier--that I had had
ten years of study and practice of military affairs. I must credit
myself with always having been ambitious. And so, when war came I had
several strings to my bow that must surely prove of value. One of these
was the acquirement of an expert knowledge of wireless telegraphy and
telegraphy generally. I had also picked up a considerable knowledge
of photography. And naturally I knew gunnery. There was a dearth of
men in the British air service at the time competent for an observer’s
duty, scarcely more than half enough to man the hundreds of aëroplanes
that were being turned out under forced pressure. For the battle of
the Somme was now under preparation and it was not only desirable but
imperative that Britain’s aviators should take the mastery of the
air. Scores of other young officers like myself possessing special
qualifications for the work were requisitioned from the other branches
of the army and put into intensive training as aviation observers.
The tragedies of Gallipoli and Belgium I had been through had not
impaired me in any degree. Shell-shock had not shattered my nerves,
physically I was in the best of shape and tests of my vision met all
requirements.
You can wager though that I said several prayers during my practice
flights. Once you got up in the air, however, there would come over you
an amazing confidence in the trustworthiness of the fragile planes and
the roaring motor.
The darts, loops, banks and volplaning that had at first turned me
somewhat dizzy, I found myself getting used to. And there’s another
thing about flying. It’s when you get ’way up. The further up you go,
the less you think about falling. Or if you do the vastness of the
upper regions simply takes all thoughts of self-importance out of a
man. You are such a midget in the immensity after all. And you find
yourself figuring, “Well, suppose I do drop? What a small thing I am
anyway in this great world.” And it sets you thinking of the millions
of men who have died in the great cause and to wondering why you should
imagine you must of necessity be one of the lucky ones to escape.
Flying would even take the “swank” out of the Kaiser or his booby-faced
son.
For all that, however, there was one time in every flight when I held
my breath--when I never quite got over being scared. That was the
landing. The observation machine we had, while not so fast as some of
the fighting flyers, was nevertheless capable of about one hundred
miles an hour. When you are going at that pace, you swallow a lot of
wind whenever you attempt to talk or rather shout. In machines of that
speed, as the reader is probably informed, they begin to drop as soon
as the pace goes under sixty miles an hour. That means you have to make
your landing at a whooping, whizzing speed, and if you are forced to a
landing away from your station and on rough ground, there will usually
be bruises in the adventure for you at least. Lord bless me! But the
earth would suddenly seem to be coming up at you fast--at express-train
speed. Even the flyer will admit to you that it is the hardest, most
nerve-racking feature of his nervous job. Just when you bring the
wheels of the machine on a level with the ground there must be a swift
upward turn--it is a ticklish proceeding, requiring “feel” as much
as scientific knowledge of the levers, and if you don’t do the thing
rightly, your plane will balk viciously, jabbing its nose into the
ground, rearing, probably somersaulting, possibly smashing itself and
you, too.
I soon came to have absolute confidence in my flyer, however. He was
Lieut. Reggie Larkin and of my Gallipoli comrades, the Australians.
He is now a youngster of not more than twenty years. But he had soon
shown in training the peculiar faculties which are as much artistic
and psychological as scientific, for the making of a fine flyer. He
was always superbly confident of himself when he took to the air,
a confidence that was contagious and of great aid to a novice like
myself. And of his bravery I have a stirring account to give before
this chapter closes.
As for me, after the first two or three training flights, I had not
much time to think of myself. I had to make a showing in acquiring the
use of the set, cinema camera with its purpose of acquiring continuous
bird’s-eye views of the enemy’s positions and in mastering the use of
aërial guns and the newer problems which they presented. This included
the study of plaster models of landscapes with special reference to
promontories the better to judge altitudes and for gun-aiming at what
lay below your sweeping aëroplane.
Now I come to my most thrilling aërial adventure--my trip through hell
in the clouds, a battle with a whirling Fokker, at that time Germany’s
crack fighting plane, of gaining what we went out and up after and
of the superb courage of Lieut. Reggie Larkin in guiding the machine
through a tempest of attack though his face was ripped and bleeding
because of shrapnel wounds.
On the line between Albert and Orvilles there was an especially
vicious, strong battery. It had done deadly and ferocious work on our
trenches. It was the more dangerous in that it evidently possessed
a perfect camouflage of natural foliage. Several attempts that had
been made to spot it had failed. One of our observation planes had
been smashed by the “archeys,” and its crew killed in the attempt to
discover the exact location of this battery.
On a morning when the battery had developed an especially deadly
activity, Larkin and I were sent up to hunt it. We made rapidly into
the air above our own sector, soon reaching an altitude of 20,000
feet. Before descending over the enemy’s territory we thought best to
investigate the upper regions to see if the Boche had any of his own
men up with the plan of performing their favorite method of attack at
this time. This would be done by the speedy Fokkers, who would take
high altitude, and hidden behind the clouds, occasionally dart forth
into the clear, looking for victims. Were such discerned, the Fokker
would come plunging down upon its prey, letting go everything it had
in the way of gun-fire and frequently blasting the objective aëroplane
into a total wreck. This is the method that the young American crack,
Lufberry, has used with havoc on the Germans. He carries three guns,
two that shoot through the propeller and one over his head.
If there was any pouncing of this character to be done, Larkin and
I had decided that we would take a shot at the trick ourselves, but
first, of course, with the consideration of escaping detection
altogether if we could, for our most important task was to send back
the knowledge of the location of the big, murderous battery.
The upward tendency of sound is almost as powerful as telegraphy. You
can actually hear the chirping of birds at an altitude of more than
1,000 feet. But when your own motor and propeller are humming and
throbbing into your ears, it is hard, if not impossible, to hear the
other fellow’s.
Evidently the enemy’s observation balloons had spotted us for all our
efforts at hiding behind the clouds at the dizzy altitude of 20,000
feet and had given the alarm. Suddenly a Fokker came cutting through
the mist not more than fifty yards away from us. I looked to see others
come soaring at us and was convinced there were probably machines below
ready to trap us should we seek flight by descent as it would be likely
for us to do from such a great altitude. But at any rate only our
single enemy was in sight.
There wasn’t an instant wasted by either of us in maneuvering. We had
come to such close quarters there wasn’t much chance. There was only
one flyer in the Fokker and he let go at us with his machine guns the
second he saw us. But in spite of his promptness, I appeared to have
beat him to the fire. Or perhaps, it was at the very same time we got
at it. How on earth such a storm of spitting bullets were sent at me
without my being hit, is still a matter of wonderment to me.
His bullets did tear through one of our wings and it was turned and
crippled slightly, but not enough to bring us down. Larkin maneuvered
swiftly above the Fokker and I knew what for. It was a chance for me to
use my bombs. I let four go at the German in as many seconds.
They did the work. We saw the Boche’s Fokker stagger, could make out
the smashing of its engine in a sheet of a flame, saw the complete
blowing away of one of the enemy’s wings and if the pilot himself was
not blown to pieces then and there he must surely have been killed a
few minutes later for the Fokker went plunging to earth like a dead
thing and later when we came out of the clouds ourselves to take
observations for the location of the battery, we saw the wreck of the
aëroplane near an enemy trench. It was reduced to a mere heap.
I thought, right after we got the German, that our own time had come.
For our aëroplane began falling with a rapidity to make you gasp for
breath. It was describing the most eccentric spirals and plunging
almost as dizzily as the Fokker. I yelled at Lieut. Larkin, though
hopelessly, my voice sounded so small. I was dazed. Yet he told me
afterward that my voice reached him. It caused him to turn his head.
For the first time I saw his bloody, wounded face. I saw also that his
hands had fallen away from the controls and that he was reaching out
helplessly toward them.
Of course, when we came into sight out of the clouds the enemy had
started all the archeys, and shrapnel from a bursting shell had torn
Larkin’s face cruelly. The shock had knocked him out for a brief
instant. I admit having uttered a swift, frantic prayer as I saw him
reaching out so feebly to regain his controls.
But with his splendid courage, he suddenly braced. We were about 1700
feet above the enemy lines when he again succeeded taking direction of
the machine. To have tried to climb directly up again in the enemy fire
must have meant our destruction. We would have been too fair a target.
Instead, Larkin boldly shot straight downward directly toward the
aërial batteries and the trenches. They thought us hit and falling and
fled from their places in fear of being caught in the crash.
Larkin shot his plane not fifty feet above the Boche trenches, but
none of them took even so much as a rifle shot at us. They either ran
or cowered in the trenches as we swept past. Then he shot up again,
cleared a small, wooded section of knolls and dropped behind them, thus
successfully getting out of the range of the archeys.
Larkin turned once again to me his blood-reddened countenance. This
time he grinned bravely, coolly.
“It’s quite all right, Dave,” he called. “The wounds are nothing. I’m
feeling quite fit again. We’ve got to spot that battery.”
So up we went. We mounted some 15,000 feet. The archeys promptly and
furiously got after us again. They spread a circular fire about us.
That is the way the archeys go after aëroplanes, not shooting directly
at them but trying to surround them with a fire that must smash them
whichever direction they may take in seeking to escape destruction.
Meanwhile, I was working my camera for all it was worth and peering
upon and around the country with my glasses. There were several small
clutters of heavily wooded knolls marking the landscape below us and
the rattle and roar of the archeys were suddenly joined by the crash
and boom of bigger guns and the distant reply of our own batteries.
I began banging my wireless exultantly. For down in the largest clutter
of knolls, under a cloak of foliage so naturally dense and perhaps
artificially assisted and affording full concealment ordinarily, I had
seen that instant sudden sparks or flares as emitted from the throats
of the big batteries’ guns in action.
Additionally, I dropped red lights visible in the daylight, over the
battery’s position, which was hardly necessary, for my wireless was
working perfectly and I soon was giving them the enemy’s range.
But the first fire from our side was poor and I was therefore excited
and indignant.
“What the devil’s the matter with you?” I wirelessed, repeating the
instructions. “If you can’t do better than that, I’ll have to get the
infantry to teach you how to shoot!”
I chuckled to think how the artillerymen would like that.
It was enough to make them try a shot at us.
But a minute later a shell ripped right through the trees that
camouflaged the battery, tearing a big gash in the concealment.
“Bull’s eye!” I shot out into the air from my key. “Give’m hell!”
With that Larkin started us for home with the archeys spitting their
rage but ineffectually.
But just the same something did happen that made all a blackness for me
until I woke up in a clearing-station hospital just behind our lines.
Brave, old Larkin was the cause. He had held his nerve and strength and
never did he falter until we were home and within twenty feet of the
ground when he suddenly lurched forward and was “out.” We crashed to
the ground and I also was “out.”
There wasn’t much the matter with me. I was only pea green from bruises
for a week. But Larkin, poor chap, had two ribs and a leg broken in
addition to having suffered the shrapnel wounds on his face.