OUR AVIATORS AND A FEW OTHERS
At first the ace is low. Our young aviators who will be among the most
romantic heroes of them all begin humbly on the ground. The American
army now has the largest flying field in France for its very own, but
during summer and early autumn many of our men trained in the French
schools. There his groundling days try the aviator's dignity. He must
hop before he can fly and perhaps "hop" is too dignified a word. When we
visited one of the biggest schools, all the new pupils were practicing
in a ridiculous clipped wing Bleriot called a penguin. This machine was
a groundhog which scurried over the earth at a speed of twenty or thirty
miles an hour. It never left the grass tops and yet it provided a
certain amount of excitement for its pilot, or maybe rider would be
better.
The favorite trick of the penguin is to turn suddenly in a short half
circle and collapse on its side. It takes a good deal of skill to keep
it straight and when the aviator has learned that much he is allowed to
make a trip in a machine which leaps a little in the air every now and
then, only to flop to earth again. Then he is ready to fly a Bleriot,
though, of course, his first trips are made as a passenger. Very little
time is spent in flying. Staying up in the air is no great trick. It's
the coming down which gives the trouble. And so the student is eternally
trying landings. He smashes a good many machines and here the French
show their keen realization of the mental factor in flying.
"I made a bad landing one day," an American student named Billy Parker
told me, "and smashed my machine up good and proper. I thought I'd
killed myself, but they dragged me out from under the junk, picked the
pieces of wood and aluminum out of my head, stuffed some cotton into my
nose to check the bleeding and in fifteen minutes they had a new machine
out and had me up in the air again."
Parker said he felt a bit queer when he got up in the air again. "I had
a sort of feeling that I belonged down on the ground and not up there,"
he said. "That was peculiar because usually the air feels very stable
and friendly. You hate to come down, but this time I was anxious to get
back and after circling the field once I came down. My landing was all
right, too, and since then I've never had that scared feeling about the
air."
The French theory is that the mistake must be corrected immediately. The
man who has had a smash-up is apt to get air shy if he has a chance to
brood over his mishap for a day or two.
The last test of the preliminary school is a thirty mile flight with
three landings. After he has done that the student goes to Pau for his
test in acrobatics. The chief stunt set for him here is a vrille. The
student is required to put his machine into a spin at a height of about
8500 feet and bring it out again. The trick is not particularly
difficult if the man keeps his head, but the tendency is to turn on the
power which only accelerates the fall and some are killed at Pau. My
friend caught malaria as soon as he got there and was allowed to take
things easily for a week. Finally his test was set for Wednesday. On
Monday morning the man who slept in the cot to his left went out for his
test and was killed and on Tuesday the man from the right hand cot was
killed. Death came very close to the young American. He and a French
student arrived at the training ground at about the same time. Two
machines were ready. The instructor hesitated a second and then assigned
the American to the machine at the right. A few minutes later the
Frenchman was killed when a wing came off his machine as soon as he
began his vrille. Fortunately Parker did not know that until after he
had passed his own test. He saw one other man killed before he left Pau
and that horrified him more than the accident on the morning of his
trial.
"The judge who decided whether you passed your test was a little
Frenchman with a monocle," he said. "He sat in a rocking chair at the
edge of the field and you had to do the vrille straight in front of him
or it didn't count. He simply wouldn't turn to look at a flyer. I was
standing beside him when one fellow got rattled in the middle of a
vrille and put his power on. Even at that he almost lifted his machine
out but she came down too fast for him. There was a big smash-up and
people came running out to the wreck. They sent for a doctor and then
for a priest, but the terrible little man never moved from his chair.
'You see,' he cried to me, 'he was stupid! stupid!' This flying test had
come to seem nothing more than an examination bluebook to him. A fellow
passed or he flunked and that was all there was to it."
Luck plays its biggest part in a flier's early days at the front. He has
a lot to learn after he gets there, but the French do not nurse him
along much. He has to take his chances. It may be that he will get in
some very tight place before he has learned the fine points and a future
star will be lost at the outset of his career. On the other hand he may
come up against German fliers as green as himself and gradually gain a
technique before he is called upon to face an enemy ace or a superior
combination of planes. At the front as in the schools the French pay
keen attention to the mental state of the fliers.
"There was always champagne at mess and they kept the graphophone
playing all through dinner any night a man from our squadron didn't come
back," an aviator said to me. "One afternoon we lost two men and before
dinner they took a leaf out of the table. Our commander didn't want us
to notice any empty seats or the extra space."
It is difficult to say which nation has the most daring aviators, but
that honor probably belongs to the English. I asked a Frenchman about it
and he said: "The English do most of the things you would call stunts.
There was one, for instance, that made a landing on a German aviation
field and after firing a few rounds at the aerodrome flew away again.
That was a stunt. But we think the English are fools with their
sportsmanship and all that. It doesn't work now. We look at it a little
differently. We cannot take fool chances. If you take a fool chance you
are very likely to get killed. That is not nice, of course. We do not
like to be killed, but more than that, it is one less man for France. We
must wait until there is a fair show."
"And when is that?" I asked.
"When there are not more than four Germans against you," said the
careful Frenchman.
The warlike spirit of the French aviators extended even to the servants
at the preliminary school which we visited. The Americans there were all
quartered in one big room and their general man of all work was a little
Annamite from French-Indo-China. Hy seemed the most peaceful member of a
peace-loving race as he moved about the barracks just before dawn every
morning waking up the students with a smiling "Bon jour" and an equally
good-natured "Café." One day he had a holiday and after borrowing a
uniform he went to a photographer's in the nearest town. From the
photographer he borrowed a rifle, a cutlass and a pistol. He thrust the
cutlass into his belt and shouldered the other two weapons. After he had
assumed a fighting face the picture was taken.
The next day Hy varied the routine. He began with "Bon jour" as usual,
but before he said "Café" he drew from behind his back the photograph,
and pointing to it proudly, exclaimed, "brave soldat."
We went from the French school to the big field where the American camp
was under construction. The bulk of the work was being done by German
prisoners. One of these, a sergeant, had been a well known architect in
Munich. The American workers consulted him now and then in regard to
some building problem and he always gave them good advice. He took
almost a professional pride in the growing buildings even if they were
designed to house the men who will one day be the eyes of the American
army. We asked another prisoner how he got along with the Americans and
he replied: "Oh, some of them aren't half bad." A third spoke to us in
meager broken English, although he said that he had lived five years in
Buffalo. "Are you going back to Germany after the war?" we asked him.
"Nein," he replied decisively, "Chicago."
Most prisoners professed to be confident that Germany would win the war
and they all based their faith on the submarine. As we started to go the
man from Buffalo suddenly held out his hand and said: "So long." Several
of the correspondents shook hands with him much to the horror of a young
American in the French flying corps who accompanied us.
"You mustn't do that," he explained. "Any Frenchman who saw you do that
would be very much shocked."
I remembered then that when I saw German prisoners in any of the large
towns the French inhabitants took great pains to ignore them. I never
heard French people jeer at their prisoners. Their attitude was one of
complete aloofness. Once I saw prisoners in a big railroad station and
the crowds swept by on either side without a glance as if these men from
Prussia had been so many trunks or trucks or benches.
If the young Americans at the school had not been so busy learning the
business of flying they could have formed a cracker jack nine or eight
or eleven, as the squad included some of the most famous of our college
athletes.
We also visited an English aerodrome which was not far from our
headquarters. This was a camp from which planes started for raids into
Germany. The men who were carrying on this work were all youngsters. I
saw no one who seemed to be more than twenty-five. Just the day before
we arrived the Germans had discovered their whereabouts and had raided
the hangars. One man had been killed and two planes wrecked. Machine gun
bullets had left holes in all the buildings about the place. The English
officer smiled when we looked about. "Oh, yes," he said, "the Hun was
over last night and gave us a bit of a bounce." His slang was fluent but
puzzling. He was explaining why he and his fellow aviators flew at a
certain height on raids. "You see," he said, "the Hun can't get his hate
up as far as that."
The bombing machines of the squadron were huge, powerful planes, but
they all had pet names painted upon them such as "Bessie" and "Baby" and
"Winifred" which had been twice to Stuttgart. These English fliers were
a quiet, reticent crowd who became fearfully embarrassed if anybody
tried to draw them out on the subject of their exploits. One of them
went over to an American Red Cross hospital nearby a few days after our
visit and played bridge with three American doctors there. He had been a
rather frequent visitor and a keen and eager player, so they were
somewhat surprised when he told them at nine o'clock that he would have
to go. He was three francs behind and started to fumble around in his
pockets to find the change. "Oh, never mind," said one of the doctors.
"Some other night will do. You'll be over here again pretty soon, I
hope."
"Oh, no," said the young Englishman, "I'd rather pay up now. Sorry to
toddle off so early. Beastly nuisance, you know, but I've got to go over
and bomb Metz to-night."
Much more would be heard of the flying exploits of the English if their
individual reticence were not combined with a governmental policy of not
announcing the names of the fliers who bring down enemy planes.
Unfortunately, the American army seems prepared to follow this example.
One of the high officers in the American air service in France said that
he did not intend to treat aviators like prima donnas. He added that he
thought it was a big mistake to advertise aces. However, the Germans
play up their star airmen in the newspapers and on the moving picture
screen and it must be admitted that they have not made many mistakes
from a purely military point of view.
Inevitably, however, the status of the flier is changing. Nobody regrets
this more than the aviators of France. The French army used to have a
saying, "all aviators are a little crazy," and nobody believed it so
thoroughly as the aviators. They took great pride in being unlike other
people in a war which was all cramped up into schedule. An aviator got
up when he felt like it and flew when the mood was on. If he felt
depressed, or unlucky, or out of sorts, he rolled over and went to sleep
again. Nobody said anything about it. When he fought the battle was a
duel with an opponent who was also a knight and sportsman although a
Boche.
But there was no keeping efficiency out of the air. The German brought
it there. He discovered that two planes were better than one and three
even better. He introduced teamwork and the lone French errants of the
air began to be picked off by groups of Germans who would send one
machine after another diving down on a single foe. The Flying Circus and
other aerial teams of the Germans have not only driven chivalry from the
air, but they have taken a good deal of the joy out of flying. Very
reluctantly the French have adopted squadron flying and the airman now
finds himself obeying commands just as if he were an infantryman or an
artillerist. Even the civilian population has begun to show that it
realized the change in the status of the aviator. There was, for
instance, poor Navarre, the finest flier in the army, who was sent to
prison because he came to Paris on a spree and ran down three gendarmes
with his racing auto. French aviators cannot see the sense of punishing
Navarre. I only heard one aviator who had any excuse to offer for the
civilian authorities.
"After all," he said, "they showed a little judgment. They did not
arrest Navarre until he had run down three gendarmes."
Although many men in the army have longer lists of fallen Germans to
their credit, no Frenchman has ever flown with the grace and skill of
Navarre. The great Guynemer was only a fair flier and owed his success
to his skill as a gunner. But Navarre was master of all the tricks. Upon
one occasion he bet a companion that he could make a landing on an army
blanket. The blanket was duly fastened in the middle of the field and
away flew the aviator. His preliminary calculation was just a bit off
and at the last minute he nosed sharply down and wrecked the machine.
But he hit the blanket and won the bet.
Next to Germany, America has done most to take romance out of the air,
so the Frenchmen say. The American air student attends lectures and
learns about meteorology and physics. He learns how to take a motor
apart and put it together again. In fact, he is versed in all the theory
of flying long before he is allowed to venture in the air. Of course
this is the best system. It would be the system of any nation which had
the opportunity of taking its time, yet the scholarly approach cannot
fail to dim adventure a little bit. Launcelot would have been a somewhat
less dashing knight if he had begun his training in chivalry by learning
the minimum number of foot pounds necessary to unhorse an opponent or
the relative resilience of chain mail and armor. Yet not all the
training in the world can take the stunt spirit out of the young
American aviator. One who shipped as a passenger with a Frenchman bound
for a bombing raid, paid for his passage by crawling out along the
fuselage of the machine to release a bomb which had stuck. But it was a
little incident back of the lines which gave me the best insight into
the character of the American aviator. I know a young aviator of
twenty-five who is already a major and the commander of a squadron. He
wasn't particularly old for his years, either. I remember he told us
with great glee how he and another young aviation officer had nailed the
purser in his cabin one night during the trip across. Yet he could be
stern upon occasion. He was walking along the field one day when he saw
a plane looping. He was surprised because the French instructor attached
to the squadron had told them that the type of machine which they were
using would not do the loop the loop. It didn't have sufficient power,
he said, nor would it stand the strain.
"It made five loops," said the major in telling the story, "and they
were dandies, too, as good as I ever saw. I thought it was the
Frenchman, of course, but I asked somebody and he said, 'No, it's
Harry.' When he came down I bawled him out. 'You were told not to do
that, weren't you?' I asked him. He said, 'Yes, sir.' 'Well, what did
you do it for?' I asked him. 'I guess it was because the Frenchman told
me it was impossible,' he said. I told him that he would have to turn
his machine over to another man and that other disciplinary measures
would be applied. He's in disgrace still and I suppose I've got to keep
it up for a while. That's all right, good discipline and all that sort
of thing, you know, but there's one thing I can't take away from him,
and nobody else can. He's the only man in France that ever looped that
type of machine. He did it. By golly, I envy him, but I don't dare let
him know it."