All of which more or less accounts for the fact that I, Slim Evans in
person, was ensconced on the edge of Chesapeake Bay three days later.
Langham Field is in the commonwealth of Virginia with the bay bounding
one edge of it. All around it on the other sides there are marshes and
estuaries and swamps and puddles and so forth.
The mosquitoes have a formal review each night, and march and
countermarch up and down any face within reach. Every once in a while
there comes an order for them to take careful aim and fire. The first
night I spent in the officers’ barracks I had no screens on my windows,
and the mosquitoes were so thick that when I started to throw my shirt
in a corner it just hung right in the air.
Seriously speaking, I was in a very pleasant frame of mind at that, and
I wouldn’t be far wrong if I said that just about every other flyer in
the service was in a similar mental condition. Granting, of course,
that any man who flies for a living has any mind at all to be in any
condition whatever.
The facts were that for weary months General Mallory, the chief, had
been lifting his melodious voice to high heaven, Congress and the world
at large, insisting that a bunch of airplanes flying out to sea with
bombs aboard could considerably embarrass any navy approaching our
shores. The fact that I was at Langham Field was simply due to the fact
that Congress had finally taken a few dollars out of the appropriation
for a new post office with a solid gold cupola for the town of Four
Forks, Arkansas, and added it to the money which had been set aside to
dredge the Yahee River in Mississippi and turned it over to the Air
Service. The latter money was made available when the Yahee turned out
to be a brook which had temporarily dried up.
The Air Service, I already knew, had developed a four thousand pound
bomb, but the dope was that for the tests mere peas, as it were,
weighing only two thousand pounds, would be used. It was the general’s
contention, which seemed to the naked eye to be well-founded, that a
few of these eggs, each with a yolk consisting of a thousand pounds of
T. N. T., when laid alongside a battleship might embarrass it a trifle.
In fact, he had an idea that said monarch of the seas might become
extinct almost immediately. It meant plenty for the Air Service if they
could prove that they could fly a hundred miles or so out to sea and
bother a navy. And when one gets down to hardpan, every flyer I ever
knew has a certain pride in his corps which is seldom equaled and never
surpassed in any organization I know, from the Independent Order of Odd
Fellows to the Queen’s Own Royal Mounted Sussex Fusileers, which
organization acts as bodyguard to the Prince of Wales, I understand,
and have heavy casulaties daily as men die of heart failure, trying to
follow him around.
I had but vague ideas of just what the plans were, and least of all as
to why I had been ordered on ahead, until I reported to Major Lamb
Johnson next morning. Major Lamb Johnson is a fox-faced little fellow
with a spike mustache consisting of five hairs on one side and four on
the other. He has a habit of blowing frequently with a loud report, and
when he comes down to earth again the second lieutenants can be found
fainting on the ground all around him.
He was striding up and down his office when I entered. From the windows
of it I could see the long line of huge, corrugated iron hangars which
bounded the southern edge of the field, and the one huge dirigible
hangar on the northern side. Eastward was Chesapeake Bay, and on the
western boundary were a few more hangars and some frame administration
buildings.
“Come in, Evans,” stated the Major. “You are here a month and a half
before the hundred-odd picked veterans of the service arrive to
commence practising for the bombing tests. The reason for your orders
is that we want you as a ferry pilot. Your job will be to commute
between here and Cleveland, Ohio, where the Martin factory is located,
flying a new twin-motored Martin bomber to Langham each trip. Have you
ever flown one?”