Not long after this there came another very interesting day in Don
Hale’s life. He had graduated from the first and second classes and was
to make his first flight in the air.
Only those who have gone through a similar experience can understand Don
Hale’s feelings when he seated himself in the cockpit of a much-used
though sturdy little plane and laid hold of the controls. No veteran
airman or famous “ace”[7] could possibly have felt more exultant or
proud.
The school by this time had become very full, and many of the _élèves_
were obliged to await their turn; so there were always plenty of
spectators on the field; and these generally paid particular attention
to the boys who were making their first trial spin in the air. This all
added to Don Hale’s tremendous desire to make a good showing; for he
still had vivid recollections of his preliminary experiences with the
“penguins.”
“Now, remember, make no attempt to turn in the air,” commanded the
moniteur in charge. “Perfectly straight flights only; fly no higher than
thirty feet above the ground.”
“Get out your tape-measure, Donny,” giggled Roy Mittengale. “Remember,
every foot adds to the jolt of the fall at the bottom.”
“Don’t try to imitate Lieutenant Thaw so much that you’ll hurt
yourself,” advised Ben Holt.
“Safety first in airplanes means not to go up at all,” chimed in
another.
Don, however, wasn’t paying the slightest attention to these jocular
remarks, for the mechanic had his hand on the propeller.
It certainly was a wonderful sensation to the young airman when he felt
the machine suddenly begin to move, slowly at first, but rapidly
gathering momentum, until, like a high power motor car, it was racing at
a speed which made him almost gasp for breath.
Presently the boy gritted his teeth together, and, with a peculiar
feeling suggestive of I-wonder-what-is-going-to-happen-next state of
mind, pulled back gently on the control stick.
And then, abruptly, he realized that the monoplane was traveling ahead
with a most wonderful smoothness. The wind rushed past, lashing and
stinging his face with its terrific force, but the heavy goggles
prevented his eyes from being affected.
Don Hale glanced over the side of the cockpit, and, a little to his
dismay, discovered that he was just skimming a few feet above the
surface of the earth.
A quick pull on the control stick sent the monoplane racing aloft, and
before the boy, trembling with excitement, could bring it to an even
keel he was far above the height limit set by the instructor.
At first Don Hale had been acutely nervous—even fearful and
apprehensive. To him it was a very marvelous thing to be actually off
the earth, the pilot of a real flying machine. And it scarcely seemed
possible that the machine should require so little attention. Like a
flash, all the unpleasant feelings that had disturbed him vanished.
Jubilant, exultant, almost ready to shout with the sheer joy of the
exhilarating sensations he was experiencing, Don Hale once more looked
earthward. How strange the ground looked flying beneath him at
incredible speed! How high above it he appeared to be! If anything
should happen to his machine a fall from that height might produce most
serious results.
With one swift, comprehensive glance, his eyes took in the boys at
various points on the field and the planes which, for one reason or
another, were resting here and there on the turf. Then his greatest
desire and ambition in the world was to descend—to return to that haven
of safety.
Yes, flying was easy enough; but when it came to making a landing—that
was where the difficulty began.
Nervously, Don switched off the current and pushed the control stick
forward.
And, to his utter dismay, the plane seemed to be falling headlong at an
acute angle—the ground to be fairly shooting up toward him.
For one brief instant he had a terrible vision of a fatal smash-up.
Then, a pull of the lever in the opposite direction brought the nose of
the machine upward again. And following this, to the boy’s intense
surprise and relief, the monoplane dropped in the most gentle fashion to
terra firma, taxi-ing across the field, its speed rapidly diminishing.
When it had come to a stop Don found his face bathed in perspiration and
his pulse throbbing in a way that it had seldom done before.
“By George! Am I actually here!” he muttered.
Notwithstanding the fact that the boy had made a mighty good landing and
could hear shouts of approval coming from the distance he was too honest
with himself to be gratified with the achievement. He knew that it was
simply a case of good luck.
“But just wait till next time!” he muttered, grimly. “By George, the
earth never seemed so fine before!”
A number of Annamites presently appeared and turned the machine around.
It was not for some time, however, that Don’s nerves quieted down
sufficiently for him to put his airplane into motion. With a fervent
hope that fate would be as kind to him as it had been before, he
switched on the ignition and once again faced the blasts of wind.
Then came the delicious moment of soaring upward—the ecstasy of feeling
himself borne through the air as swiftly as the arrow from an archer’s
bow and that sense of wonderful freedom which the airman alone can
enjoy.
As before, he glanced downward, and a humorous thought came into his
mind.
“Certainly I’m the biggest thirty feet that was ever known above the
ground,” he murmured. “I hope I don’t fly to the moon.”
With astonishing rapidity the distant hangars, from hazy, indistinct
objects, became strong and clear. He could see the students and
instructors, watching, it seemed to him, with an interest and close
attention that fired his spirit with the keenest determination to make a
landing that would surprise them.
He did.
But the machine was not badly wrecked, nor was he himself injured by the
fall of fifteen feet.
It was merely a case, Mittengale genially explained, in which the earth
happened to be that many feet lower than it should have been.
Don said very little. It rather jarred his sensibilities to hear the
mirthful laughter and bantering remarks and to see the Annamites towing
an extraordinarily wobbling machine toward the repair shop. And, besides
this, to add to his disturbed state of mind, the moniteur, a boyish chap
named Boulanger, very loudly called attention to the error which had
caused the accident, between times roundly scolding him.
“Quite a neat little bawling out!” chirped Dublin Dan, soothingly. “It’s
a great life if you don’t weaken.”
“I don’t include that word in my vocabulary,” exclaimed Don, with a half
smile.
But though Don Hale’s start in the third class had not been particularly
auspicious, nevertheless, by the end of the day he managed to gain
sufficient mastery over the plane to receive a “_Pas mal_, Hale!”—“Not
bad!” from the same moniteur who had chided him.
That evening, while lying in his bunk, he summed up the situation in
regard to himself. There were other pupils who had made faster progress,
but the boy felt sure that what he had learned he had thoroughly
learned. He knew, however, that there was a tremendous amount of work
ahead of him before he could possibly hope to equal the skill of the
most humble flyer of the Lafayette Squadron—a squadron which he
devoutly hoped to join.
Difficulties have the effect on some natures of spurring them to greater
zeal and determination; so it was in the case of Don Hale. Each failure,
each “bawling out,” each chorus of laughter only acted as a stimulus.
In a little less than a week he had acquired sufficient skill in driving
the machine in straight courses across the field to be promoted another
step—that is to the _tour de piste_, or tour of the aviation field at a
height of about three hundred feet.
This was, of course, designed to teach the airmen how to make their
turns in the air, an operation requiring the greatest accuracy and care.
Up to this time Don thought he had enjoyed about all the thrills that it
was possible to have, but the first _tour de piste_ undeceived him. All
the other experiences faded into insignificance when compared to this.
In his splendid isolation from all mankind, he was filled with a certain
sense of awe a little unnerving at first. He was in a situation where no
power save his own could be of any avail, and on the first two or three
occasions involuntary tremors shook his frame as the Bleriot monoplane
banked, or swung around at an angle.
Happily, however, there was no tragedy to record. With increasing
confidence, Don dared to rise higher, and within a few hours had reached
the required altitude. From this elevation he viewed with absorbed
attention the wonderful panorama, which, like a colored map, was
outspread before him, revealing fields of various forms, shapes and
colors, and patches of woods and hills. And dividing the landscape were
light lines—the roads—running in all directions.
His first tour was satisfactory to himself and his instructors. The
turns held no terror for him.
Following this several days of bad weather put a stop to the work of the
school. During the enforced inactivity Bobby Dunlap had his curiosity
and interest in Victor Gilbert and Jason Hamlin still further heightened
by a violent altercation between the two, although neither he nor any
one else was near enough to overhear the conversation. The fact, too,
that the young chaps had evidently been just on the point of indulging
in a physical encounter made the “Gilbert-Hamlin affair,” as Bobby
termed it, decidedly interesting.
“I’m going to find out all about it some day,” he laughed, nodding his
head emphatically.
“Bully boy!” chuckled Sid Marlow.
When the period of dull weather was over Don Hale started in with
greater zeal than ever. He was doing his best to equal the record of T.
Singleton Albert, who had so far recovered his nerve that he had no
hesitancy at all in executing the vrille.
By gradual degrees, Don took his machine to greater altitudes, until, at
length, he was making the _tour de piste_ at a height of three thousand
five hundred feet. Now feeling somewhat like a veteran, he was fully
prepared when the order came for him to perform some of the simpler
evolutions in the air. One of these consisted in spiraling down to the
earth with the engine shut off and landing almost directly beneath the
point at which he started. Another was to volplane swiftly downward, and
then, while still several hundred feet in the air, bring the machine to
a horizontal position and swing around either to the right or left.
These exercises proved to be a pretty severe test on his nerves, and at
first affected his head and stomach in a truly distressing manner; but
constant practice, combined with a determined will, finally enabled him
to gain the mastery over them, and he began keenly to enjoy the great
and thrilling swoops through space.
At length there came a time to which he had been looking forward most
anxiously, and that was the beginning of his training in a big Caudron
biplane, a rather slow but safe machine. This meant that Don Hale’s stay
at the École Militaire de Beaumont was nearly at an end.
There were now but two tests before him, one known as the _petit voyage_
and the other the _grande voyage_. The first was a sixty mile trip and
return; the second a triangular journey, each side being about seventy
miles in length.
By the time Don had passed these successfully T. Singleton Albert and
Victor Gilbert had gone to the great finishing school located at Pau, in
the southern part of France.
It was indeed a happy moment to Don when he received his “_Brevet
d’Aviateur Militaire_” from the War Department, which made him a
corporal in the French army. This merely meant, however, that he had
graduated from the school at Beaumont, and, like the two who had
preceded him, was sent to take a course in “acrobatics” at Pau.
Pau, he found, was very delightfully situated, and within sight of the
snow-capped Pyrenees.
With even added zest, Don Hale entered into the work before him. It was
more dangerous than anything he had attempted in the school at Beaumont;
but the tactics he learned were of extreme importance, being precisely
those used in air fighting on the front.
About the middle of his course Don Hale was ordered to report to the
Mitrailleuse school at Casso, on the shore of a lake, where soldiers in
all branches of the army are trained in the use of machine guns. In a
two-seater, piloted by another airman, Don Hale practiced firing at
captive balloons and moving targets on the lake.
At first it proved very difficult, but constant work soon enabled him to
meet the requirements of his instructors.
After the completion of this training he returned to Pau for a short
period. Following this he went to Plessis Belleville to add a few final
touches before being assigned to combat duty in one of the escadrilles.
The boy’s greatest ambition was to join the Lafayette, where he might be
near his chum George Glenn, and he passed through a period of much
anxiety before the matter was finally settled in the affirmative by the
military authorities.
Proud and happy indeed, in his neatly-fitting uniform, with the
corporal’s stripes on his sleeve and the golden wings and star insignia
on his collar, Don Hale set out on his journey to join the escadrille,
then encamped not far from Bar-le-Duc, near the Verdun front.
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Footnote 7:
Ace—a pilot who has brought down five or more enemy planes.