Whatever the professional distinction may be between the two branches
of the aviation service, the broad difference in the public mind
between the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service is that
the former fly over land and the latter over sea. And whatever the
relative advantages, and the reverse, of these opposite conditions
may be, a certain amount of sympathy inevitably goes out to the naval
airman in the supposedly more difficult element from which he starts
and on which he has to make his "landing" on return. The mystery and
the menace of the sea, which has always made sailors a race apart,
is so real and apprehensible a thing, even to the landsman, that
instinctively the sea is felt to be a source of greater peril to the
airman than the land.
Be this as it may, it has fallen to the lot of the Royal Flying
Corps in this war to face an "element"--if one may call it such--as
mysterious as the ocean, and not a whit less menacing. This is the
desert--a thing which casts a spell upon those who have to dare it as
potent and as fearful as any with which the sea holds the mariner in
thrall.
Mutable to the eye as the face of the waters, sudden and fickle in mood
as the sea itself, there lurks in the desert an even grimmer menace
than that which gives the sailor his wary, vigilant eye. The cruelty of
the sea is nothing to the cruelty of the desert. Ask the airman who has
made trial of both, and he will tell you that better a hundred times
the risk of falling into the clutches of the uncertain sea than the
chance of finding himself at the mercy of the pitiless desert.
Here is a case in point--a little excerpt from the doings of the Royal
Flying Corps, which it would be hard to match even in the records of
that adventurous service. Pilot and observer set off in an aeroplane
upon a single-handed reconnaissance towards the enemy's lines in Sinai.
A long flight was made over the desert, and the machine was a long way
from its base when that terrible bugbear known as "engine-trouble"
developed. All attempts to right it in the air proved abortive, and a
forced descent was made. The aeroplane alighted on the desert waste,
and the two occupants worked feverishly to adjust the faulty mechanism.
Their dismay can be imagined when they found repair impossible, and
realized that between themselves and the Canal lay a stretch of some
twenty miles of desert, over which no means of progress was possible to
them save their own legs.
It says much for the loyalty to the duty of these two airmen that they
carefully dismantled the gun which was mounted on the machine before
setting fire to the latter, and that they actually set off on their
long tramp across the burning desert carrying the gun between them.
It soon became evident that any idea of saving the gun by taking it all
the way with them was hopeless. The weight, not inconsiderable under
any condition, was insupportable, and before long there was no course
possible but to bury the weapon in the sand, obliterating as best they
could all tell-tale traces which might reveal its hidden presence to a
chance enemy patrol.