INSIDE the German lines at the start of the war I met Ingold, then the
first ace of the German aërial outfit; only the Germans did not call
them aces in those days of the beginnings of things. The party to
which I was attached spent the better part of a day as guests of Herr
Hauptmann Ingold and his mates. Later we heard of his death in action
aloft.
Coming over for this present excursion I crossed on the same steamer
with Bishop of Canada--a major of His Britannic Majesty's forces at
twenty-two, and at twenty-three the bearer of the Victoria Cross and
of every other honour almost that King George bestows for valour and
distinguished service, which means dangerous service. I have forgotten
how many boche machines this young man had, to date, accounted for.
Whether the number was forty-seven or fifty-seven I am not sure. I doubt
if Bishop himself knew the exact figure.
At Paris, after my arrival, and at various places along the Front I have
swapped talk and smoking tobacco with sundry more or less well-known
members of the Lafayette Escadrille and with unattached aviators of
repute and proved ability. From each of these men and from all of
them--Belgians, Italians, Americans, Britishers and Frenchmen--I brought
away an impression of the light-hearted gallantry, the modesty and
the exceeding great competency which appear to be the outstanding
characteristics of those who do their fighting--and, in a great many
instances, their dying--in the air. It was almost as though the souls
of these men had been made cleaner and as though their spirits had been
made to burn with a whiter flame by reason of the purer element in which
they carried on the bulk of their appointed share in this war business.
You somehow felt that when they left the earth they shook off from their
feet a good part of the dirt of the earth. I do not mean to imply that
they had become superhuman, but that they had acquired, along with their
training for a special and particularised calling, some touch of the
romanticism that attached to the ancient and dutiful profession of
knight-errantry.
Nor is this hard to understand. For a fact the flying men are to-day
the knights-errant of the armies. To them are destined opportunities for
individual achievement and for individual initiative and very often for
individual sacrifice such as are denied the masses of performers in this
war, which in so many respects is a clandestine war and which in nearly
all respects is an anonymous war. I think sometimes that, more even than
the abject stupidity of the enterprise, it is the entire taking-away of
the drama--the colour of theatricalism, the pomp and the circumstance,
the fuss and the feathers--that will make war an exceedingly unpopular
institution for future generations, as it has been an exceedingly
unprofitable if a highly necessary one for this present generation. When
the planet has been purged of militarism, the parent sin of the whole
sinful and monstrous thing, I am convinced that the sordid, physically
filthy drabness that now envelops the machinery of it will be as potent
an agency as the spreading of the doctrine of democracy in curing
civilised mankind of any desire to make war for war's sake rather than
for freedom and justice.
One has only to see it at first hand in this fourth year of conflict
to realise how completely war has been translated out of its former
elements. It is no longer an exciting outdoor sport for fox-chasing
gentlemen in bright-red coats; no longer a seasonal diversion for
crosscountry riders in buckskin breeches. It is a trade for expert
accountants, for civil-engineering sharps, for rule of thumb, for pick
and shovel and the land surveyor's instruments. As the outward romance
of it has vanished away, in the same proportion the amount of manual
labour necessary to accomplish any desired object has increased until
it is nearly all work and mighty little play--a combination which makes
Jack a dull boy and makes war a far duller game than it used to be. Of
course the chances for heroic achievements, for the development and
the exercise of the traits of courage and steadfastness and disciplined
energy, are as frequent as ever they were, but generally speaking the
picturesqueness with which mankind always has loved to invest its more
heroic virtues has been obliterated--flattened under the steam roller.
To the average soldier is denied the prospect of ever meeting face
to face the foe with whom he contends. For every man who with set jaw
climbs the top to sink his teeth, figuratively or actually, in the
embodied enemy, there are a dozen who toil and moil far back behind in
manual labours of the most exacting and exhausting forms imaginable. A
night raid is a variety of sublimated burglary, better adapted to
the temperament of the prowler and the poacher than to the upstanding
soldier man's instincts. If there be fear of gas he adds to the
verisimilitude of the imitation by hiding his face behind a mask as
though he were a footpad. If a battle be a massacre, which generally
it is, then intermittent fighting is merely organised and systematised
assassination.
By stealth, by trick and device, by artificial expedients smacking of
the allied schools of the housebreaker and the highwayman, things are
accomplished that once upon a bygone time eventuated from brawn, plus
powder, plus chilled steel. Trench work means setting a man to dig in
the mud a hole that may become his grave, and frequently does. He spends
his days in a shallow crevice in the earth and his nights in a somewhat
deeper one, called a dug-out. He combines in his customary life the
habits of the boring grub and the habits of the blind worm, with a touch
of the mine mule thrown in.
Once in a while he stings like a puff-adder, but not often. The
infantryman plies a spade a week for every hour that he pumps a rifle.
The cavalryman is more apt to be driving a truck or tramping long roads
than riding a horse. The artilleryman sets up his pieces miles behind
the line and fires at the indirect target of an invisible foe, without
the poor satisfaction of being able to tell, with his eyes, whether he
scored a hit or a miss. A sum in arithmetic is his guide and a telephone
operator is his mentor. Mayhap some day a hostile shell descends out of
a clear sky upon his battery; and then the men are mess and the guns are
scrap and that is all there is to that small chapter of the great tale
of the war.
The bomber who spends months learning how to cast the grenade may never
get a chance to cast one except in practice. A man fights for his flag
but doesn't see it when the action starts, for then it is furled. The
regimental band plays him off to church service but not into the battle.
When the battle begins the bandmen have exchanged their horns for the
handles of a litter, becoming stretcher bearers. The general wears no
epaulets. He wears a worried look brought on by dealing o' nights with
strategic problems out of a book. The modern thin red line is a thing
done in bookkeeper's ink on a ruled form. So it goes. The bubble
reputation is won, not at the cannon's mouth, but across a desk top in
a shell-proof fox den far from where the cannon are. The gallant six
hundred do not ride into the jaws of death. Numbering many times six
hundred, they advance afoot, creeping at a pallbearer's pace behind a
barrage fire. So it keeps on going.
In only one wing of the service, and that the newest of all the wings,
is there to be found a likeness to the chivalry and the showiness of
these other times. The aviator is the one exception to a common rule. To
him falls the great adventure. He goes jousting in the blue lists of
the sky, helmeted and corseleted like a crusader of old. His lance is
a spitting machine gun. His steed is a twentieth-century Pegasus, with
wings of fine linen and guts of tried steel. Thousands of envying eyes
follow him as he steers his single course to wage his single combat, and
if he takes his death up there it is a clean, quick, merciful death high
above the muck and more and jets of noxious laboratory fumes where the
rest take theirs.
Even the surroundings of the birdman's nest are physically nore
attractive than the habitat of his brother at arms who bides below.
I can think of nothing homelier in outline or colour than the
shelters--sometimes of planking, sometimes of corrugated iron, sometimes
of earth--in which the soldiers hide here in France. The field hospital
is apt to be a distressingly plain structure of unpainted boards with
sandbags banked against it.
I have seen a general's headquarters in an underground tunnel that was
like an overgrown badger's nest, with nothing outwardly to distinguish
it from a similar row of tunnels except that it had a lettered sign over
its damp and dripping mouth.
Tents, which have a certain picturesque quality when grouped, are rarely
seen here in this closely settled Europe, where nearly always there are
enough roofed and walled buildings to provide billets for the troops,
however numerous. Instead of tents there are occasionally jumbles of
makeshift barracks, and more often haphazard colonies of sheds serving
as garages or as supply depots or as offices or as what not. War, which
in itself is so ugly a thing, seems to possess the facility of making
ugly its accessories before and after the fact.
But the quarters of the flying machines, through their vastness and
isolation, acquire a certain quality of catching the eye that is
entirely lacking for the rest of the picture--the big hangars in the
background, suggesting by their shape and number the pitched encampment
of a three-ring circus; the flappy canvas shields at the open side of
the dromes, which being streaked and daubed with paint camouflage,
enhance the carnival suggestion by looking, at a distance, like
side-show banners; the caravans of trucks drawn up in lines; and in fine
weather the flying craft resting in the landing field, all slick and
groomed and polished, like a landed proprietor's blooded stock, giving
off flashes from aluminum and varnish and steel and deft cabinetwork in
answer to the caresses of the sunshine.
Right here I am reminded that the temperamental differences of the
Allied nations are shown most aptly, I think, in the fashion in which
the aviators decorate their gorgeous pets.
Upon its planes, of course, each bears the distinguishing mark of the
country to which it belongs, but the bodies are the property, so to
speak, of the individual flyers, to be treated according to the fancy of
the individual.
Thus it befalls that an Italian machine generally carries a picture of
a flower upon its sides. It is characteristic of the race that a French
machine usually wears either a valorous, sonorous name or the name of
a woman--perhaps the name of the aviator's sweetheart, or that of his
mother or his sister possibly. But your average British airman is apt
to christen his machine Old Bill or Gaby or Our Little Nipper or
The Walloping Window Blind--I have seen all of these cheery titles
emblazoned upon splendid big aircraft in a British hangar--and just let
it go at that.
I reckon the German, taking his morning hate along with his morning
chicory, never will understand how it is the Britisher and the Yankee
can make war and make jokes about it and be good sportsmen all at the
same time. The German is very sentimental--I myself have heard him with
tears in his voice singing his songs of the home place and the Christmas
tree and the Rhine maiden as he marched past a burning orphan asylum in
Belgium; but his sense of humour, if ever he really owned such a thing,
was long ago smothered to death by the poisoned chemical processes of
his own military machine. The man who was so bad that he was scared
of himself must have been the original exemplar of the frightfulness
doctrine. Anyhow he was born in Prussia--I'm sure of that much anyway.
But I am getting away from my subject--have been getting away from it
for quite a spell, I fear; because in the first place I started out to
tell about a meeting and a trip and a dinner and a song and divers other
things. The affair dated from a certain spring noontime when two of us,
writers by trade, were temporarily marooned for the day at the press
headquarters of the American Expeditionary Force because we couldn't
anywhere get hold of an automobile to take us for a scouting jaunt along
the American sector. All of a sudden a big biplane came sailing into
sight, glittering like a silver flying fish. It landed in a meadow
behind the town and two persons, muffled in greatcoats, decanted
themselves out of it and tramped across the half-flooded field toward
us. When they drew near we perceived them to be two very young, very
ruddy gentlemen, and both unmistakably English. My companion, it seemed,
knew one of them, so there were introductions.
“What brings you over this way?” inquired my friend.
“Well, you see,” said his acquaintance, “we were a bit thirsty--Bert
and I--and we heard you had very good beer at the French officers' club
here. So we just ran over for half an hour or so to get a drop of drink
and then toddle along back again. Not a bad idea, eh, what?”
The speaker, I noted, wore the twin crowns of a captain on the shoulder
straps of his overcoat. His age I should have put at twenty-one or
thereabout, and his complexion was the complexion of a very new, very
healthy cherub.
We showed the way toward beer and lunch, the latter being table d'hôte
but good. En route my confrère was moved to ask more questions.
“Anything new happening at the squadron since I was over that way?” he
inquired.
“Quiet enough to be a bore--weather hasn't suited for our sort these
last few evenings,” stated the taller one. “We got fed up on doin'
nothin' at all, so night before last a squad started across the border
to give Fritzie a taste of life. But just after we started the squadron
commander decided the weather was too thickish and he signed us
back--all but the Young-un, who claims he didn't see the flare and kept
on goin' all by his little self.” He favoured us with a tremendous wink.
“It seemed a rotten shame, really it did, to waste the whole evenin'.”
This was the Young-un, he of the pink cheeks, speaking. “So I just
jogged across the jolly old Rhine until I come to a town, and I dropped
my pills there and came back. Nice quiet trip it was--lonely rather, and
not a bit excitin'.”
Upon me a light dawned. I had heard of these bombing squadrons of the
British outfits of young but seasoned flying men, who, now that reprisal
in kind had been forced upon England and France by the continued
German policy of aërial attacks on unprotected and unarmed cities,
made journeys from French soil by sky line to enemy districts, there
to spatter down retaliatory bombs upon such towns as Mainz, Stuttgart,
Coblenz, Mannheim, Treves and Metz.
The which sounded simple enough in the bald telling, but entailed
for each separate pair of flyers on each separate excursion enough of
thrill, suspense and danger to last the average man through all his
various reincarnations upon this earth. It meant a flight by darkness at
sixty or seventy miles an hour, the pilot at the wheel and the observer
at the guardian machine gun, above the tangled skeins of friendly
trenches; and a little farther on above and past the hostile lines,
beset for every rod of the way, both going and coming, by peril of
attack from antiaircraft gun and from speedier, more agile German
flyers, since the bombing airship is heavier and slower than scout
planes commonly are. It meant finding the objective point of attack and
loosing the explosive shells hanging like ripe plums from lever hooks
in the frame of the engine body; and this done it meant winging back
again--provided they got back--in time for late dinner at the home
hangars.
Personally I craved to see more of men engaged upon such employment.
Through lunch I studied the two present specimens of a new and special
type of human being. Except that Bert was big and the Young-un was
short, and except that the Young-un spoke of dropping pills when he
meant to tell of spilling potential destruction upon the supply depots
and railroad terminals of Germany, whereas Bert affectionately referred
to his machine as The Red Hen and called the same process laying an egg
or two, there was no great distinction to be drawn between them.
Both made mention of the most incredibly daring things in the most
commonplace and casual way imaginable; both had the inquisitive nose and
the incurious eye of their breed; both professed a tremendous interest
in things not one-thousandth part so interesting as what they themselves
did; and both used the word “extraordinary” to express their convictions
upon subjects not in the least extraordinary, but failed to use it
when the topic dealt with their own duties and deserved to excess the
adjectival treatment. In short, they were just two well-bred English
boys.