OUT of the luncheon sprang an invitation, and out of the invitation
was born a trip. On a day when the atmosphere was better fitted for
automobiling in closed cars than for bombings we headed away from our
billets, travelling in what I shall call a general direction, there
being four of us besides the sergeant who drove. Things were stirring
along the Front. Miles away we could hear the battery heavies thundering
and drumming, and once in a lull we detected the hammering staccato of
a machine gun tacking down the loose edges of a fight that will never be
recorded in history, with the earnestness and briskness of a man laying
a carpet in a hurry.
The Romans taught the French how to plan highroads, and the French never
forgot the lesson. The particular road we travelled ran kilometre on
kilometre straight as a lance up the hills and down again across the
valleys, and only turned out to round the shoulders of a little mountain
or when it flanked the shore line of one of the small brawling French
rivers. The tall poplars in pairs, always in pairs, which edged it
were like lean old gossips bending in toward the centre the better to
exchange whispered scandal about the neighbours. Mainly the road pierced
through fields, with infrequent villages to be passed and once a canal
to be skirted; but also there were forests where wild boar were
reputed to reside and where, as we know, the pheasant throve in numbers
undreamed of in the ante-bellum days before all the powder in Europe
was needed to kill off men, and while yet some of it might be spared for
killing off birds.
Regarding the mountains a rule was prevalent. If one flank of a mountain
was wooded we might be reasonably sure that the farther side would
present a patchwork pattern of tiny farms, square sometimes, but more
often oblong in shape, each plastered against the steep conformation
and each so nearly perpendicular that we wondered how anybody except a
retired paper hanger ever dared try to cultivate it. Let a husbandman's
foot slip up there and he would be committing trespass in the plot of
the next man below.
I shall not tell how far we rode, or whither, but dusk found us in a
place which, atmospherically speaking, was very far removed from the
French foothills, but geographically perhaps not so far. So far as its
local colour was concerned the place in point more nearly than anything
else I call to mind resembled the interior of a Greek-letter society's
chapter house set amid somewhat primitive surroundings. In the centre of
the low wide common room, mounted on a concrete box, was a big openwork
basket of wrought iron. In this brazier burned fagots of wood, and the
smoke went up a metal pipe which widened out to funnel shape at the
bottom, four feet above the floor.
Such a device has three advantages over the ordinary fireplace: Folks
may sit upon four sides of it, toasting their shins by direct contact
with the heat, instead of upon only one, as is the case when your
chimney goes up through the wall of your house. There were illustrations
cut from papers upon the walls; there were sporting prints and London
dailies on the chairs and trestles; there was a phonograph, which
performed wheezily, as though it had asthma, and a piano, which by
authority was mute until after dinner; there were sundry guitars and
mandolins disposed in corners; there were sofa pillows upon the settees,
plainly the handiwork of some fellow's best girl; there were clumsy,
schoolboy decorative touches all about; there were glasses and bottles
on tables; there were English non-coms, who in their gravity and
promptness might have been club servants, bringing in more bottles and
fresh glasses; and there were frolicking, boisterous groups and knots
and clusters of youths who, except that they wore the khaki of junior
officers of His Majesty's service instead of the ramping patterns
affected by your average undergraduates, were for all the world just
such a collection of resident inmates as you would find playing the
goat and the colt and the skylark in any college fraternity hall on any
pleasant evening anywhere among the English-speaking peoples.
For guests of honour there were our four, and for hosts there were sixty
or seventy members of Night Bombing Squadron Number ----.
It so happened that this particular group of picked and sifted young
daredevils represented every main division of the empire's domain. As
we were told, there were present Englishmen, Cornishmen, Welshmen, Scots
and Irishmen; also Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, an Afrikander
or two, and a dark youngster from India; as well as recruits gathered in
from lesser lands and lesser colonies where the Union Jack floats in the
seven seas that girdle this globe.
The ranking officer--a major by title, and he not yet twenty-four years
old--bore the name of a Highland clan, the mere mention of which set
me to thinking of whanging claymores and skirling pipes. His next in
command was the nephew and namesake of a famous Home Ruler, and this
one spoke with the soft-cultured brogue of the Dublin collegian. We were
introduced to a flyer bred and reared in Japan, who had hurried to the
mother isle as soon as he reached the volunteering age--a shy, quiet
lad with a downy upper lip, who promptly effaced himself; and to a young
Tasmanian of Celtic antecedents, who, curiously enough, spoke with an
English accent richer and more pronounced than any native Englishman in
the company used.
I took pains to ascertain the average age of the personnel of the
squadron. I am giving no information to the enemy that he already does
not know--to his cost--when I state it to be twenty-two and a half
years. With perfect gravity veteran airmen of twenty-three or so will
tell you that when a fellow reaches twenty-five he's getting rather a
bit too old for the game--good enough for instructing green hands and
all that sort of thing, perhaps, but generally past the age when he
may be counted upon for effective work against the Hun aloft. And the
wondrous part of it is that it is true as Gospel. 'Tis a man's game,
if ever there was a man's game in this world; and it's boys with the
peach-down of adolescence on their cheeks that play it best.
Well, we had dinner; and a very good dinner it was, served in the
mess hall adjoining, with fowls and a noble green salad, and good
honest-to-cow's butter on the table. But before we had dinner a thing
befell which to me was as simply dramatic as anything possibly could be.
What was more, it came at a moment made and fit for dramatics, being
as deftly insinuated by chance into the proper spot as though a skilled
playmaster had contrived it for the climax of his second act.
Glasses had been charged all round, and we were standing to drink the
toast of the British aviator when, almost together, two small things
happened: The electric lights flickered out, leaving us in the half glow
of the crackling flames in the brazier, its tints bringing out here a
ruddy young face and there a buckle of brass or a button of bronze but
leaving all the rest of the picture in flickering shadows; right on top.
of this a servant entered, saluted and handed to the squadron commander
a slip of paper bearing a bulletin just received by telephone from the
headquarters of a sister squadron in a near-by sector. The young major
first read it through silently and then read it aloud:
“Eight machines of squadron ------ made a day-light raid this afternoon.
The operation was successfully carried out.” A little pause. “Three of
the machines failed to return.”
That was all. Three of the machines failed to return--six men, mates to
these youngsters assembled here and friends to some of them, had gone
down in the wreckage of their aircraft, probably to death or to what was
hardly less terrible than death--to captivity in a German prison camp.
Well, it was all in the day's work. No one spoke, nor in my hearing did
any one afterward refer to it. But the glasses came up with a jerk, and
at that, as though on a signal from a stage manager, the lights flipped
on, and then together we drank the airman's toast, which is:
“Happy landings!”
I do not profess to speak for the others, but for myself I know I drank
to the memory of those six blithe boys--riders in the three machines
that failed to return--and to a happy landing for them in the eternity
to which they had been hurried long before their time.
The best part of the dinner came after the dinner was over, which was as
a dinner party should be. We flanked ourselves on the four sides of the
fire, and tobacco smoke rose in volume as an incense to good fellowship,
and there were stories told and limericks offered without number. And if
a story was new we all laughed at it, and if it was old we laughed just
the same. Presently a protesting lad was dragooned for service at the
piano. The official troubadour, a youth who seemed to be all legs and
elbows, likewise detached himself from the background. Instead of taking
station alongside the piano he climbed gravely up on top of it and
perched there above our heads, with his legs dangling down below the
keys. Touching on this, the Young-un, who sat alongside of me, made
explanation:
“Old Bob likes to sit on the old jingle box when he sings, you know. He
says that then he can feel the music going up through him and it makes
him sing. He'll stay up there singing like a bloomin' bullfinch
till some one drags him down. He seems to sort of get drunk on
singin'--really he does. Extraordinary fancy, isn't it?”
I should have been the last to drag Old Bob down. For, employing a
wonderful East Ender whine, Old Bob sang a gorgeous Cockney ballad
dealing with the woeful case of a simple country maiden, and her smyle
it was sublyme, but she met among others the village squire, and the
rest of it may not be printed in a volume having a family circulation;
but anyway it was a theme replete with incident and abounding in
detail, with a hundred verses more or less and a chorus after every
verse, for which said chorus we all joined in mightily.
From this beginning Old Bob, beating time with both hands, ranged far
afield into his repertoire. Under cover of his singing I did my level
best to draw out the Young-un--who it seemed was the Young-un more by
reason of his size and boyish complexion than by reason of his age,
since he was senior to half his outfit--to draw him out with particular
reference to his experiences since the time, a year before, when he quit
the line, being then a full captain, to take a berth as observer in the
service of the air.
It was hard sledding, though. He was just as inarticulate and just as
diffident as the average English gentleman is apt to be when he speaks
in the hated terms of shop talk of his own share in any dangerous or
unusual enterprise. Besides, our points of view were so different. He
wanted to hear about the latest music-hall shows in London; he asked
about the life in London with a touch in his voice of what I interpreted
as homesickness. Whereas I wanted to know the sensations of a youth who
flirts with death as a part of his daily vocation. Finally I got him
under way, after this wise: “Oh, we just go over the line, you know, and
drop our pills and come back. Occasionally a chap doesn't get back. And
that's about all there is to tell about it.... Rummiest thing that has
happened since I came into the squadron happened the other night. The
boche came over to raid us, and when the alarm was given every one
popped out of his bed and made for the dugout. All but Big Bill over
yonder. Big Bill tumbled out half dressed and more than half asleep.
It was a fine moonlight night and the boche was sailing about overhead
bombing us like a good one, and Big Bill, who's a size to make a good
target, couldn't find the entrance to either of the dugouts. So he ran
for the woods just beyond here at the edge of the flying field, and no
sooner had he got into the woods than a wild boar came charging at him
and chased him out again into the open where the bombs were droppin'.
Almost got him, too--the wild boar, I mean. The bombs didn't fall
anywhere near him. Extraordinary, wasn't it, havin' a wild boar turn
up like that just when he was particularly anxious not to meet any wild
boar, not being dressed for it, as you might say? He was in a towerin'
rage when the boche went away and we came out of the dugouts and only
laughed at him instead of sympathisin' with him.”
He puffed at his pipe.
“Fritz gets peevish and comes about to throw things at us quite
frequently. You see, this camp isn't in a very good place. We took it
over from the French and it stands out in the open instead of being in
the edge of the forest where it should be. Makes it rather uncomfy for
us sometimes--Fritzie does.”
All of which rather prepared me for what occurred perhaps five minutes
later when for the second time that night the electric lights winked
out.
Old Bob ceased from his carolling, and the mess president, a little
sandy Scotchman, spoke up:
“It may be that the boche is coming to call on us--the men douse the
lights if we get a warning; or it may be that the battery has failed. At
any rate I vote' we have in some candles and carry on. This is too fine
an evening to be spoiled before it's half over, eh?”
A failed battery it must have been, for no boche bombers came. So upon
the candles being fetched in, Old Bob resumed at the point where he had
left off. He sang straight through to midnight, nearly, never minding
the story telling and the limerick matching and the laughter and the
horse play going on below him, and rarely repeating a song except by
request of the audience. If his accompanist at the piano knew the air,
all very well and good; if not, 'Old Bob sang it without the music.
They didn't in the least want us to leave when the time came for us to
leave, vowing that the fun was only just starting and that it would
be getting better toward daylight. But ahead of us we had a long ride,
without lights, over pitchy-dark roads, so we got into our car and
departed. First, though, we must promise to come back again very soon,
and must join them in a nightcap glass, they toasting us with their
airmen's toast, which seemed so well to match in with their buoyant
spirits.
When next I passed by that road the hangars were empty of life and the
barracks had been tom down. The great offensive had started the week
before, and on the third day of it, as we learned from other sources,
our friends of Night Bombing Squadron Number ----, obeying an order, had
climbed by pairs into their big planes and had gone winging away to do
their share in the air fighting where the fighting lines were locked
fast.
There was need just then for every available British aëroplane--the more
need because each day showed a steadily mounting list of lost machines
and lost airmen. I doubt whether many of those blithesome lads came out
of that hell alive, and doubt very much, too, whether I shall ever see
any of them again.
So always I shall think of them as I saw them last--their number being
sixty or so and the average age twenty-two and a half--grouped at
the doorway of their quarters, with the candlelight and the firelight
shining behind them, and their glasses raised, wishing to us “Happy
landings!”