THE "BEDOUIN" SQUADRON
The "Bedouin" Squadron, so called because as a unit it was constantly
moved from place to place, and because its members as individuals were
wanderers at heart, was formed in September, 1917, equipped with the
large Handley-Page bombing planes, and sent to the Nancy front to carry
out pioneer work in long-distance bombing. The "Bedouins," as the
officers of this squadron were called, first saw the light of day in
England, Scotland, Ireland, America, India, Canada, South Africa, and
Australia. Before becoming aviators many of them had fought in the
infantry on the western front, in Gallipoli, and in Egypt; some as
officers, some as privates, but for no general reason, unless the law
of nature which prevents squirrels from remaining on the ground also
applies to men, they one by one in divers ways drifted into the Flying
Corps, and flew different types of machines on different fronts until
brought together and formed, "willy-nilly," into the Bedouin Squadron.
I
There was "Jimmie," whose insides had been shot away in Gallipoli. He
was the envy of the officers' mess, because his newly acquired digestive
apparatus, composed principally of silver tubes, could assimilate more
wine without producing ill results than any other five members of the
mess. Jimmie was not a flying officer; by all the laws of nature he
should have been a corpse, but he had a heart which disregarded an
intestine designed by a surgeon who must have been a plumber in some
previous incarnation, and this great heart carried him through four
years of war, and made of him an energizing force to all who came in
contact with him. It was not until after the cessation of hostilities
that the soul of this hero was liberated from the poor maimed body with
its mechanical digestive system.
Jimmie was the First Lieutenant of the Station; it was his job to see to
the discipline of the two hundred and fifty mechanics, riggers,
carpenters, armorers, drivers, and officers' stewards. He did this in
such a way as to make all the men love him except the few, very few, who
were surly slackers, and these feared him worse than death itself.
Jimmie was always just, but he demanded results. To those who shirked he
was a just judge and an unsympathetic jury; so, under Jimmie, slackers
soon became demons for work, and later on learned like the others to
love him. To those who produced results, he was a father.
[Illustration: JIMMIE WALKS UP AND DOWN THE TRENCH]
I remember that shortly after the squadron took up its residence on the
Nancy front, the Huns came over and bombed us severely; many of the
mechanics were fresh from the factories in England and were quite
unaccustomed to seeing the damage that one hundred pounds of high
explosive can do to the delicate anatomy of the human being; panic
seized them; but a greater fear possessed them when Jimmie's orders
burst upon them like the rat-tat-tat of a machine gun; they marched as
if on parade into the trenches, recently dug behind the hangars; then
Jimmie, smoking an occasional cigarette, strolled up and down in front
during the three hours' bombardment.
So the men soon learned, under Jimmie, the value of discipline; it meant
their safety when under fire, and it meant freedom from military
punishments. They were quick to grasp the fact that any negligence on
their part might mean death to the aviator who flew in the neglected
aeroplane. Flagrant neglect they soon learned might cause other deaths
than those suffered by the unfortunate aviators.
II
There was Sammie, a prototype of the caricatured Englishman in our comic
papers. Every American theatre-goer has seen Sammie exaggerated on the
music-hall stage.
Sammie was a small boy with an eyebrow on his upper lip and an
apparently permanent window over his right eye. Before joining the
Flying Corps he had served seventeen months in the trenches as a
private; finally, driven mad with filth, rats, and other vermin, he
captured an enemy machine-gun emplacement single-handed, and was given a
commission. Shortly afterwards he joined the Flying Corps, probably
because he could not keep his new uniform clean while in the trenches.
Sammie was always immaculate, and as a uniform gives one very little
opportunity to express one's individuality in dress, Sammie carried his
handkerchief up his sleeve. Even Generals envied Sammie's field boots
and every one who met him wanted to know the name of his tailor.
In peace-time Sammie would have looked like a toy Pom with a ribbon
around its neck; but a more imperturbable man in the face of danger
never lived.
"My word" was the expression used by Sammie to denote every degree of
human emotion. If it was Sammie's lot to draw the occasional egg served
in the Bedouin mess, his only remark when it hopped out of reach would
be, "My word."
I remember one night when both of our machines were out of action,
Sammie and I, who slept in the same hut, went to bed at the early hour
of twelve o'clock; at about one in the morning the Huns dropped their
first bomb very close to us; a picture of Sammie's mother was on a stand
beside the head of his cot; a fragment of the bomb came through the wall
of the hut and shattered this picture; I landed, as far as I know
involuntarily, in the middle of the floor with a lighted torch in my
hand; Sammie saw the shattered remains of his mother's picture; "My
word, mother will be pleased," he said, turned over and was sound asleep
instantly. I know Sammie slept because he never remarked on my taking a
short cut to the trenches through the window.
Another time when a Hun bomb dropped in the officers' trench and failed
to explode, Sammie, who was but two feet away, tried to lift it, failed,
and then lay full length upon it, believing it to be of the "delay
action" variety; when our Major, a bomb expert, appeared on the scene a
few moments later and laughingly declared the bomb a "dud," Sammie's
embarrassment expressed itself in "My word." If the detonating apparatus
of this bomb had been all that the Huns intended it to be, Sammie would
have returned to minute specks of dust and his name would have been
added to the long list of dead heroes; but since the bomb was a "dud,"
Sammie was made the butt of his friends' wit.
Sammie was always philosophical. He was once ordered to take a new
machine on a very long raid. We had all examined this new aeroplane and
declared it a "dud"; so we cheered Sammie up as well as we could by
drinking his health and inquiring into his taste in flowers. Undismayed,
Sammie took the machine off the ground, with the wheel held into his
stomach; the rigging of the machine was such that it would fly on an
even plane longitudinally if the wheel was kept back as far as possible.
By all the laws of aeronautics this aeroplane should have crashed before
leaving the ground, but it did not. Sammie climbed it to five hundred
feet in an hour and a half. As Sammie now had seven and one half hours
petrol left and was still four hours away from his objective, it would
have been quite justifiable for him to return without going any farther;
in fact, it was the only reasonable thing for him to do; but Sammie
always trusted to luck rather than reason, and his luck did not fail
him. One engine "conked" and he was forced to turn back. He fired his
forced landing signal when approaching the aerodrome, but the aerodrome
was being bombed by the Huns in a very thorough manner and Sammie had to
land in complete darkness, the inevitable result being a crash. Sammie
extricated himself from the wreckage, found that both of his companions
were dead, rescued one of the machine guns from its damaged mounting,
together with several drums of ammunition and practised his marksmanship
on the enemy planes until an enemy bomb ruined his clothes and left him,
after a few months in the hospital, minus an arm.
III
There was "Jock," a "wee bonnie laddie," from the south of Scotland. He
stood five feet three inches tall when wearing field boots with
exceptionally high heels, but that did not prevent him from braining a
Hun with the Hun's own wrench some sixty miles back of the enemy's front
lines, and this is how it happened.
One morning, about three o'clock, information arrived, together with a
complete and undamaged Hun aeroplane and two friendly Hun aviators,
that at a certain German switch station a troop train and an ammunition
train were due to pass at a certain hour. Jock and his pal left the
congenial beer barrel, turned the friendly Hun aviators over to the
guard, made themselves acquainted with the Hun aeroplane, refilled it
with petrol and oil, and departed on a merry adventure. Forgetting that
the Hun machine would be subject to attack by our own aviators, Jock and
his companion were in a great dilemma when so attacked. Of course, they
could not protect themselves by a counter-fire, but when a man is born
in Scotland, and is a direct descendant of oatmeal-eating bandits, he
naturally has a keener brain than even the Jews can boast of;
consequently, by spinning nose dives and other signs of lack of control
the wily Scot gleefully gained the enemy's side of the lines. Here he
was unmolested, although Hun aviators must have been astonished to see
one of their own machines engaged in the British sport of
"hedge-hopping"; i.e., flying close to the ground and "zooming" up over
trees, houses, etc.
In due time Jock and his companion landed in a small field a few hundred
yards away from the all-important switch station. Here they descended
and under pretence of examining their engine, although the first one of
the ever-curious crowd was still several fields away, they looked up the
word "wrench" in an English-German pocket dictionary; they then marched
off to the switch station. Fortunately there was but one occupant, for
neither Jock nor his companion could talk German, and the idiocy of not
carrying a more serviceable weapon than a pocket dictionary never
occurred to the mad Scot until his companion began to make weird
gurgling sounds, evidently intended for the language of the Hun,
addressed to the astonished station-master.
Then down through generations of oatmeal-eating bandits came a glimmer
of sense to Jock. He grabbed the first thing within reach, a wrench, and
brained the Hun station-master with a blow; then the mad but somewhat
sobered adventurers found and pulled the switch lever so as to bring the
approaching trains into collision, and departed. When Jock saw the crowd
which had collected about his aeroplane, he took a solemn oath never to
touch beer but to stick to whiskey; but the crowd, which included a few
Hun soldiers, respectfully made way for the "camouflaged" British
aviators and a few moments later, wet with cold perspiration, they were
in the air. Thoroughly sobered, they made for home with their engine
"full out." Six weeks later "intelligence" reported that a German troop
train and ammunition train had collided.
IV
There was "Mac," a North of England man. Before the war he was a typical
English sportsman; he lived for hunting, and polo was his hobby. Like
the rest of his class he pushed his way into the fighting line as soon
as possible, as a private in the First Hundred Thousand. But eventually
his genius expressed itself and leaving the known walks of man he became
a master of the newly conquered element. Mac's mind was not limited by
science, his soul was not dwarfed by religious prejudice, he held no
political position, and he had no personal military ambition. He fought
to defeat a threat to the civilization he believed in, to preserve a
form of government that his ancestors had bled and died for, and to
secure a future for his tiny son free from the hell of war. Mac, like
every other man who had the courage to fight, and if necessary, die for
his beliefs, hoped that the fighting man would be allowed to fight on
until these ends had been achieved so that those who had died should not
have made the great sacrifice in vain. He hoped, like all other fighting
men, that politicians would not be given the power to render valueless
to posterity the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of lives; but Mac
was merely a man, of fearless integrity, honesty of purpose, with
humanitarian ideals, and a believer in Democracy; he could not realize
that a large majority, because of selfishness, ignorance, and a lack of
the spirit of self-sacrifice, do not deserve the right to vote. But Mac
was a sportsman and a gentleman, the descendant of generations of men
who faced death willingly in a cause they knew was honorable and who
died happily in the thought that their death made life easier for
future generations. So Mac did not worry about the selfish ambitions of
men; he did all he could to win the World War.
I first met Mac a few months after he flew a Handley-Page machine from
London to Constantinople and back to Salonica, a distance of over two
thousand miles. Mac was a Captain then, he is a Captain now, but no
living man has done more damage to the Hun than Mac has done. A far
greater leader of men than his great uncle, who was a General in our
Civil War, Mac gave a soul to the Bedouin Squadron. To Mac's leadership
is due the first bombings of Mannheim, Coblenz, Thionville, Frankfort,
and Cologne.
It was Mac who flew a German aeroplane to Sedan, followed a "spotted"
train to a near-by station, swooped down as the German High Command left
the train and opened on them with his machine gun. It was Mac who
landed over ten times near Karlsruhe at night and returned with
invaluable information. But it is not because of the innumerable
suicidal adventures of which Mac is the hero that every Bedouin, no
matter in what part of the world he may be, always drinks a silent toast
to Mac whenever possible; it is because every Bedouin realizes that a
great man carried out a small man's job in a great way.
V
"Gus" was the president of the Bedouin mess, and probably because of an
early education at Heidelberg, he believed in starving the British
aviator. At all events, while Gus was mess president we all starved with
agonizing slowness, for Gus had but two ideas of what constituted a
menu. Our meals consisted solely of "bully beef" and Brussels sprouts;
this meal was varied occasionally by leaving out the sprouts. To every
indignant complaint from long-suffering members of the officers' mess,
Gus would answer with the incontrovertible statement that
"humming-birds' tongues cannot be purchased with tuppence"; this
incontrovertible statement always reduced the complaining member to
frothings at the mouth and other signs of inexpressible rage.
Nevertheless, under the starvation system of Gus's stewardship a large
credit balance was established at the Societe Generale, which enabled
the succeeding mess president to replace the expert electrician, who by
army wisdom had been converted into a poisonous cook, with a Frenchman,
whose cooking was not cooking at all, but an art which filled the
Bedouins with admiration and destroyed their waist lines. Six-course
banquets, ending with a rare old yellow Chartreuse, became the order of
the day, and whenever some seductive delicacy defied analysis we would
ask Gus if it contained the tongue of the humming-bird.
But Gus, although a failure in always satisfying the epicurean tastes of
the Bedouins, won fame by being the first to bomb Cologne.
VI
"Mid" was a Yank who joined the squadron a few months before its
"bust-up." Mid had been a private in the first American contingent to
arrive in France; but because he was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and knew
that automobiles were manufactured in Detroit, Michigan, he was given a
commission. The Bedouins first met Mid in January, 1918. He had run his
car--Mid was always driving a car--into a snowdrift, and wandered a
couple of miles through a blizzard in search of help. Fortunately for
us, he tumbled into our mess in the midst of a "storm celebration";
i.e., a celebration in honor of a storm which forces birds and all other
inhabitants of the air to seek shelter. Mid was pounced upon, placed in
front of the fire, and given hot rum. A crew of men were sent off to dig
his "benzine buggy" out of the snow and convey it to Mid's station, it
having been decided that Mid should spend the night with the Bedouins.
Mid soon won the hearts of the Bedouins by showing a proper appreciation
for hot rum, and when he prefaced his first remark to the C.O. with
"Say, kid," the Bedouins realized that Mid gave every promise of making
this "storm celebration" unique in Bedouin history, and as far as Mid
was concerned it certainly was.
Mid entered into the spirit of the occasion with Western thoroughness
and learned a lesson in a few hours which it has taken some men years to
learn--that hot rum when taken on a cold and empty stomach must be
treated with respect; in fact, a certain amount of coyness is not out of
place. Mid was soon being supported on a chair while he delivered an
epic on the "soul of a jellyfish"; he was then tossed in the "sacred
blanket" and put through other Bedouin initiations; after which he was
tucked comfortably in Jock's bed, while Jock, bound hand and foot and
rolled in blankets, made horrid Highland remarks from the draughty floor
of the hut.
Dear old Mid, however, bore no ill-will to the Bedouins for what he
might have considered unceremonious treatment of an American officer who
was an honored guest. The next morning with a humble but dignified mien,
Mid apologized for everything that he had done. As a matter of fact, the
only disreputable thing Mid had done while under the influence of an
excess of hot rum on an empty stomach was to make friends with a few
men whom the Huns had sworn to kill on sight.
Nothing daunted, Mid soon "wangled" permission to become attached to the
Bedouin Squadron, and a more dare-devil spirit and lovable comrade than
Mid did not exist among the Bedouins. He was always as keen for work as
he was "full out" for a party, and he was always the life of a
celebration. I remember one night when the C.O. read out at dinner a
telegram which concisely stated that His Majesty the King had awarded to
one of the Bedouins a very great honor, Mid broke loose. "Say, kids," he
said, "I want to say right here that it's a great honor for my mother's
younger son to be a Bedouin, and since it's a 'dud' night I want to ask
your permission, Sir" (turning to the C.O.), "to present every Bedouin
with a quart of the best." Permission being given by the C.O. on the
condition that the C.O. himself would be allowed to share in the
"largess," every Bedouin had placed before him a quart of Heidsieck
Monopole. Songs and speeches followed, and Mid, since he could not "take
the air," took the floor.
"Fellow citizens," he said, balancing himself on an upturned beer
barrel, "it gives me great pleasure to be able to stand before you this
evening"; support given and applause. "It has always seemed to me that
the greatest country in the world might be considered a bit slow in
entering the war." [Hear! Hear!] "But, gentlemen, now that we are in, I
want to say that we will be the first out." [Loud applause!] "I want you
to understand that because the United States has always been considered
the historic enemy of Great Britain, Germany was enabled to persuade an
ignorant electorate that the United States and Germany were friends.
But now we are in, we are in to the finish. When I say finish,
gentlemen, I mean a finish to the fighting, but I beg of you to be
careful of the non-fighting part of my country's population, and their
representatives. More I cannot say, except this, if ever your King or
your sea-power is threatened, you may depend upon every true American;
we owe you a debt, and depend upon it every descendant of the founders
of our country will die before that obligation is allowed to be
repudiated." With loud cheers, Mid was lifted from his perch.
VII
The Bedouin who held the unenvied record for crashes was known
throughout the service as "Killem." Almost every time he went on a raid
he crashed his machine, fortunately for him on this side of the lines.
One night, returning from a raid on the Boche magneto works at
Stuttgart, he lost his way and was forced to land, because of engine
trouble, in France, near the Swiss border. The topography of the country
here being mountainous, he was fortunate in merely "writing off" his
aeroplane. He might easily have killed himself and his two companions,
but he came out of the crash quite unhurt except for a severe chill
contracted by a forced sojourn in the icy waters of a shallow pond.
Pinned beneath the wreckage of his machine with an unpleasant ripple of
water in close proximity to his chin, Killem had an excellent
opportunity to think over his past sins while his companions in misery,
who had been thrown clear for no other reason apparently except that the
devil takes care of his own, struggled manfully, one with a broken arm
and the other with a wrenched knee, to release him from the pressure of
wreckage which held him helpless.
A few nights after this unpleasant experience the mad fellow "took off"
down wind. This idiotic method of leaving the ground resulted in his
being barely able to rise above the roofs of the near-by village and
brought him into direct contact with the church spire. The spire being
of solid construction withstood the impact; the aeroplane did not. So
Killem and his companions, together with the wrecked Handley-Page and
one thousand five hundred and sixty-eight pounds of undetonated bombs
descended onto the street below--UNDETONATED. It was exceedingly
fortunate for the inhabitants of the French village that the bombs
remained undetonated. Killem crawled out of the wreck, looked ruefully
at the church spire, and muttered, "I've always felt that I should have
gone oftener to church in my youth. Now look at the damned result of my
negligence."
It was Killem who tested out a new aeroplane one day while a south wind
equal to the air speed of his machine was blowing. While flying north he
travelled over the ground twice as fast as he travelled through the air,
but when he turned around over the city of Toul he remained stationary.
He was travelling through the air as fast as before, but now he was
headed south, and as the wind passed over the ground toward the north as
rapidly as Killem travelled through the air toward the south, the
inhabitants of Toul were amazed to see a heavier-than-air machine
remaining stationary above their heads. This situation greatly alarmed a
dear old lady of Toul, who eventually arrived at our aerodrome in a
donkey cart with the astounding information that one of our planes "had
run out" of petrol and was stalled directly above her house.