metres. Many a pleasant afternoon had we spent there, walking through
its narrow, crooked streets, or lounging on the banks of the canal.
The cathedral too was a favorite haunt. I loved the fine spaciousness
of it. Looking down on it now, it seemed no larger than a toy
cathedral in a toy town, such as one sees in the shops of Paris. The
streets were empty, for it was not yet seven o'clock. Strips of shadow
crossed them where taller roofs cut off the sunshine. A toy train,
which I could have put nicely into my fountain-pen case, was pulling
into a station no larger than a wren's house. The Greeks called their
gods "derisive." No doubt they realized how small they looked to them,
and how insignificant this little world of affairs must have appeared
from high Olympus.
There was a road, a fine straight thoroughfare converging from the
left. It led almost due southwest. This was my route to C----. I
followed it, climbing steadily until I was at two thousand metres. I
had never flown so high before. "Over a mile!" I thought. It seemed a
tremendous altitude. I could see scores of villages and fine old
châteaux, and great stretches of forest, and miles upon miles of open
country in checkered patterns, just beginning to show the first fresh
green of the early spring crops. It looked like a world planned and
laid out by the best of Santa Clauses for the eternal delight of all
good children. And for untold generations only the birds have had the
privilege of seeing and enjoying it from the wing. Small wonder that
they sing. As for non-musical birds--well, they all sing after a
fashion, and there is no doubt that crows, at least, are extremely
jealous of their prerogative of flight.
My biplane was flying itself. I had nothing to do other than to give
occasional attention to the revolution counter, altimetre, and
speed-dial. The motor was running with perfect regularity. The
propeller was turning over at twelve hundred revolutions per minute
without the slightest fluctuation. Flying is the simplest thing in the
world, I thought. Why doesn't every one travel by route of the air?
If people knew the joy of it, the exhilaration of it, aviation schools
would be overwhelmed with applicants. Biplanes of the Farman and
Voisin type would make excellent family cars, quite safe for women to
drive. Mothers, busy with household affairs, could tell their children
to "run out and fly" a Caudron such as I was driving, and feel not the
slightest anxiety about them. I remembered an imaginative drawing I
had once seen of aerial activity in 1950. Even house pets were granted
the privilege of traveling by the air route. The artist was not far
wrong except in his date. He should have put it at 1925. On a fine
April morning there seemed no limit to the realization of such
interesting possibilities.
I had no more than started on my southwest course, as it seemed to me,
when I saw the spires and the red-roofed houses of C----, and, a
kilometre or so from the outskirts, the barracks and hangars of the
aviation school where I was to make the first landing. I reduced the
gas, and, with the motor purring gently, began a long, gradual
descent. It was interesting to watch the change in the appearance of
the country beneath me as I lost height. Checkerboard patterns of
brown and green grew larger and larger. Shining threads of silver
became rivers and canals, tiny green shrubs became trees, individual
aspects of houses emerged. Soon I could see people going about the
streets and laundry-maids hanging out the family washing in the back
gardens. I even came low enough to witness a minor household
tragedy--a mother vigorously spanking a small boy. Hearing the whir of
my motor, she stopped in the midst of the process, whereupon the
youngster very naturally took advantage of his opportunity to cut and
run for it. Drew doubted my veracity when I told him about this. He
called me an aerial eavesdropper and said that I ought to be ashamed
to go buzzing over towns at such low altitudes, frightening
housemaids, disorganizing domestic penal institutions, and generally
disturbing the privacy of respectable French citizens. But I was
unrepentant, for I knew that one small boy in France was thinking of
me with joy. To have escaped maternal justice with the assistance of
an aviator would be an event of glorious memory to him. How vastly
more worth while such a method of escape, and how jubilant Tom Sawyer
would have been over such an opportunity when his horrified warning,
"Look behind you, aunt!" had lost efficacy.
Drew had been waiting a quarter of an hour, and came rushing out to
meet me as I taxied across the field. We shook hands as though we had
not seen each other for years. We could not have been more surprised
and delighted if we had met on another planet after long and hopeless
wanderings in space.
While I superintended the replenishing of my fuel and oil tanks he
walked excitedly up and down in front of the hangars. He was an
odd-looking sight in his flying clothes, with a pair of Meyrowitz
goggles set back on his head, like another set of eyes, gazing at the
sky with an air of wide astonishment. He paid no attention to my
critical comments, but started thinking aloud as soon as I rejoined
him.
"It was lonely! Yes, by Jove! that was it. A glorious thing, one's
isolation up there; but it was too profound to be pleasant. A relief
to get down again, to hear people talk, to feel the solid earth under
one's feet. How did it impress you?"
This was like Drew. I felt ashamed of the lightness of my own
thoughts, but I had to tell him of my speculations upon after-the-war
developments in aviation: nurses flying Voisins, with the cars filled
with babies; old men having after-dinner naps in twenty-three-metre
Nieuports, fitted, for safety, with Sperry gyroscopes; family parties
taking comfortable outings in gigantic biplanes of the R-6 type;
mothers, as of old, gazing apprehensively at speed-dials, cautioning
fathers about "driving too fast," and all of the rest.
Drew looked at me reprovingly, to be sure, but he felt the need, just
as I did, of an outlet to his feelings, and so he turned to this kind
of comic relief with the most delightful reluctance. He quickly lost
his reserve, and in the imaginative spree which followed we went far
beyond the last outposts of absurdity. We laughed over our own wit
until our faces were tired. However, I will not be explicit about our
folly. It might not be so amusing from a critical point of view.
After our papers have been viséed at the office of the commandant, we
hurried back to our machines, eager to be away again. We were to make
our second landing at R----. It was about seventy kilometres distant
and almost due north. The mere name of the town was an invitation.
Somewhere, in one of the novels of William J. Locke, may be found this
bit of dialogue:--
"But, master," said I, "there is, after all, color in words. Don't you
remember how delighted you were with the name of a little town we
passed through on the way to Orleans? R----? You were haunted by it
and said it was like the purple note of an organ."
We were haunted by it, too, for we were going to that very town. We
would see it long before our arrival--a cluster of quaint old houses
lying in the midst of pleasant fields, with roads curving toward it
from the north and south, as though they were glad to pass through so
delightful a place. Drew was for taking a leisurely route to the
eastward, so that we might look at some villages which lay some
distance off our course. I wanted to fly by compass in a direct line,
without following my map very closely. We had planned to fly together,
and were the more eager to do this because of an argument we had had
about the relative speed of our machines. He was certain that his was
the faster. I knew that, with mine, I could fly circles around him. As
we were not able to agree on the course, we decided to postpone the
race until we started on the homeward journey. Therefore, after we had
passed over the town, he waved his hand, bent off to the northeast,
and was soon out of sight.
I kept straight on, climbing steadily, until I was again at five
thousand feet. As before, my motor was running perfectly and I had
plenty of leisure to enjoy the always new sensation of flight and to
watch the wide expanse of magnificent country as it moved slowly past.
I let my mind lie fallow, and every now and then I would find it
hauling out fragments of old memories which I had forgotten that I
possessed.
I recalled, for the first time in many years, my earliest
interpretations of the meanings of all the phenomena of the heavens.
Two old janitor saints had charge of the floor of the skies. One of
them was a jolly old man who liked boys, and always kept the sky swept
clean and blue. The other took a sour delight in shirking his duties,
so that it might rain and spoil all our fun. Perhaps it was Drew's
sense of loneliness and helplessness so far from earth, which made me
think of winds and clouds in friendly human terms. However that may
be, these reveries, hardly worthy of a military airman, were abruptly
broken into.
All at once, I realized that, while my biplane was headed due north, I
was drifting north and west. This seemed strange. I puzzled over it
for some time, and then, brilliantly, in the manner of the novice,
deduced the reason: wind. I was being blown off my course, all the
while comfortably certain that I was flying in a direct line toward
R----. Our _moniteurs_ had often cautioned us against being
comfortably certain about anything while in the air. It was our duty
to be uncomfortably alert. Wind! I wonder how many times we had been
told to keep it in mind at all times, whether on the ground or in the
air? And here was I forgetting the existence of wind on the very
first occasion. The speed of my machine and the current of air from
the propeller had deceived me into thinking that I was driving dead
into whatever breeze there was at that altitude. I discovered that it
was blowing out of the east, therefore I headed a quarter into it, to
overcome the drift, and looked for landmarks.
I had not long to search. Wisps of mist obstructed the view, and
within ten minutes a bank of solid cloud cut it off completely. I had
only a vague notion of my location with reference to my course, but I
could not persuade myself to come down just then. To be flying in the
full splendor of bright April sunshine, knowing that all the earth was
in shadow, gave me a feeling of exhilaration. For there is no
sensation like that of flight, no isolation so complete as that of the
airman who has above him only the blue sky, and below, a level floor
of pure white cloud, stretching in an unbroken expanse toward every
horizon. And so I kept my machine headed northeast, that I might
regain the ground lost before I discovered the drift northwest. I had
made a rough calculation of the time required to cover the seventy
kilometres to R---- at the speed at which I was traveling. The rest I
left to Chance, the godfather of all adventurers.
He took the initiative, as he so frequently does with aviators who, in
moments of calm weather, are inclined to forget that they are still
children of earth. The floor of dazzling white cloud was broken and
tumbled into heaped-up masses which came drifting by at various
altitudes. They were scattered at first and offered splendid
opportunities for aerial steeplechasing. Then, almost before I was
aware of it, they surrounded me on all sides. For a few minutes I
avoided them by flying in curves and circles in rapidly vanishing
pools of blue sky. I feared to take my first plunge into a cloud, for
I knew, by report, what an alarming experience it is to the new pilot.
The wind was no longer blowing steadily out of the east. It came in
gusts from all points of the compass. I made a hasty revision of my
opinion as to the calm and tranquil joys of aviation, thinking what
fools men are who willingly leave the good green earth and trust
themselves to all the winds of heaven in a frail box of cloth-covered
sticks.
The last clear space grew smaller and smaller. I searched for an
outlet, but the clouds closed in and in a moment I was hopelessly lost
in a blanket of cold drenching mist.
I could hardly see the outlines of my machine and had no idea of my
position with reference to the earth. In the excitement of this new
adventure I forgot the speed-dial, and it was not until I heard the
air screaming through the wires that I remembered it. The indicator
had leaped up fifty kilometres an hour above safety speed, and I
realized that I must be traveling earthward at a terrific pace. The
manner of the descent became clear at the same moment. As I rolled out
of the cloud-bank, I saw the earth jauntily tilted up on one rim,
looking like a gigantic enlargement of a page out of Peter Newell's
"Slant Book." I expected to see dogs and dishpans, baby carriages and
ash-barrels roll out of every house in France, and go clattering off
into space.
IV
AT G. D. E.
Somewhere to the north of Paris, in the _zone des armées_, there is a
village, known to all aviators in the French service as G. D. E. It is
the village through which pilots who have completed their training at
the aviation schools pass on their way to the front; and it is here
that I again take up this journal of aerial adventure.
We are in lodgings, Drew and I, at the Hôtel de la Bonne Rencontre,
which belies its name in the most villainous fashion. An inn at
Rochester in the days of Henry the Fourth must have been a fair match
for it, and yet there is something to commend it other than its
convenience to the flying field. Since the early days of the
Escadrille Lafayette, many Americans have lodged here while awaiting
their orders for active service. As I write, J. B. is asleep in a bed
which has done service for a long line of them. It is for this reason
that he chose it, in preference to one in a much better state of
repair which he might have had. And he has made plans for its purchase
after the war. Madame Rodel is to keep careful record of all its
American occupants, just as she has done in the past. She is pledged
not to repair it beyond the bare necessity which its uses as a bed may
require, an injunction which it was hardly necessary to lay upon her,
judging by the other furniture in our apartment. Drew is not
sentimental, but he sometimes carries sentiment to extremities which
appear to me absurd.
When I attempt to define, even to myself, the charm of our adventures
thus far, I find it impossible. How, then, make it real to others? To
tell of aerial adventure one needs a new language, or, at least, a
parcel of new adjectives, sparkling with bright and vivid meaning, as
crisp and fresh as just-minted bank-notes. They should have no taint
of flatness or insipidity. They should show not the faintest trace of
wear. With them, one might hope, now and then, to startle the
imagination, to set it running in channels which are strange and
delightful to it. For there is something new under the sun: aerial
adventure; and the most lively and unjaded fancy may, at first, need
direction toward the realization of this fact. Soon it will have a
literature of its own, of prose and poetry, of fiction, biography,
memoirs, of history which will read like the romance it really is. The
essayists will turn to it with joy. And the poets will discover new
aspects of beauty which have been hidden from them through the ages;
and as men's experience "in the wide fields of air" increases, epic
material which will tax their most splendid powers.
This brings me sadly back to my own purpose, which is, despite many
wistful longings of a more ambitious nature, to write a plain tale of
the adventures of two members--prospective up to this point--of the
Escadrille Lafayette. To go back to some of those earlier ones, when
we were making our first cross-country flights, I remember them now
with a delight which, at the time, was not unmixed with other
emotions. Indeed, an aviator, and a fledgling aviator in particular,
often runs the whole gamut of human feeling during a single flight. I
did in the course of half an hour, reaching the high C of acute panic
as I came tumbling out of the first cloud of my aerial experience.
Fortunately, in the air the sense of equilibrium usually compels one
to do the right thing, and so, after some desperate handling of my
"broom-stick," as the control is called which governs ailerons and
elevating planes, I soon had the horizons nicely adjusted again. What
a relief it was! I shut down my motor and commenced a more gradual
descent, for I was lost, of course, and it seemed wiser to land and
make inquiries than to go cruising over half of France looking for one
among hundreds of picturesque old towns. There were at least a dozen
within view. Some of them were at least a three hours' walk distant
from each other. But in the air! I was free to go whither I would, and
swiftly.
After leisurely deliberation I selected one surrounded by wide fields
which appeared to be as level as a floor. But as I descended the
landscape widened, billowing into hills and folding into valleys. By
sheer good luck, nothing more, I made a landing without accident. My
Caudron barely missed colliding with a hedge of fruit trees, rolled
down a long incline, and stopped not ten feet short of a small
stream. The experience taught me the folly of choosing landing-ground
from high altitudes. I needn't have landed, of course, but I was then
so much an amateur that the buffeting of cross-currents of air near
the ground awed me into it, come what might. The village was out of
sight over the crest of the hill. However, thinking that some one must
have seen me, I decided to await developments where I was.
Very soon I heard a shrill, jubilant shout. A boy of eight or ten
years was running along the ridge as fast as he could go. Outlined
against the sky, he reminded me of silhouettes I had seen in Paris
shops, of children dancing, the very embodiment of joy in movement. He
turned and waved to some one behind, whom I could not see, then came
on again, stopping a short distance away, and looking at me with an
air of awe, which, having been a small boy myself, I was able to
understand and appreciate. I said, "Bonjour, mon petit," as cordially
as I could, but he just stood there and gazed without saying a word.
Then the others began to appear: scores of children, and old men as
well, and women of all ages, some with babies in their arms, and
young girls. The whole village came, I am sure. I was mightily
impressed by the haleness of the old men and women, which one rarely
sees in America. Some of them were evidently well over seventy, and
yet, with one or two exceptions, they had sound limbs, clear eyes, and
healthy complexions. As for the young girls, many of them were
exceptionally pretty; and the children were sturdy youngsters, not the
wan, thin-legged little creatures one sees in Paris. In fact, all of
these people appeared to belong to a different race from that of the
Parisians, to come from finer, more vigorous stock.
They were very curious, but equally courteous, and stood in a large
circle around my machine, waiting for me to make my wishes known. For
several minutes I pretended to be busy attending to dials and valves
inside the car. While trying to screw my courage up to the point of
making a verbless explanation of my difficulty, some one pushed
through the crowd, and to my great relief began speaking to me. It was
Monsieur the Mayor. As best I could, I explained that I had lost my
way and had found it necessary to come down for the purpose of making
inquiries. I knew that it was awful French, but hoped that it would be
intelligible, in part at least. However, the Mayor understood not a
word, and I knew by the curious expression in his eyes that he must be
wondering from what weird province I hailed. After a moment's thought
he said, "Vous êtes Anglais, monsieur?" with a smile of very real
pleasure. I said, "Non, monsieur, Américain."
That magic word! What potency it has in France, the more so at that
time, perhaps, for America had placed herself definitely upon the side
of the Allies only a short time before. I enjoyed that moment. I might
have had the village for the asking. I willingly accepted the rôle of
ambassador of the American people. Had it not been for the language
barrier, I think I would have made a speech, for I felt the generous
spirit of Uncle Sam prompting me to give those fathers and mothers,
whose husbands and sons were at the front, the promise of our
unqualified support. I wanted to tell them that we were with them now,
not only in sympathy, but with all our resources in men and guns and
ships and aircraft. I wanted to convince them of our new understanding
of the significance of the war. Alas! this was impossible. Instead I
gave each one of an army of small boys the privilege of sitting in the
pilot's seat, and showed them how to manage the controls.
The astonishing thing to me was, that while this village was not
twenty kilometres off the much-frequented air route between C---- and
R----, mine was the first aeroplane which most of them had seen.
During long months at various aviation schools pilots grow accustomed
to thinking that aircraft are as familiar a sight to others as to
them. But here was a village, not far distant from several aviation
schools, where an aviator was looked upon with wonder. To have an
American aviator drop down upon them was an event even in the history
of that ancient village. To have been that aviator,--well, it was an
unforgettable experience, coming as it did so opportunely with
America's entry into the war. I shall always have it in the background
of memory, and one day it will be among the pleasantest of many
pleasant tales which I shall have in store for my grandchildren.
However, it is not their potentialities as memories which endear these
adventures now, but rather it is because they are in such contrast to
any that we had known before. We are always comparing this new life
with the old, so different in every respect as to seem a separate
existence, almost a previous incarnation.
Having been set right about my course, I pushed my biplane to more
level ground, with the willing help of all the boys, started my motor,
and was away again. Their shrill cheers reached me even above the roar
of the motor. As a lad in a small, Middle-Western town, I have known
the rapture of holding to a balloon guy-rope at a county fair, until
"the world's most famous aeronaut" shouted, "Let 'er go, boys!" and
swung off into space. I kept his memory green until I had passed the
first age of hero worship. I know that every youngster in a small
village in central France will so keep mine. Such fame is the only
kind worth having.
A flight of fifteen minutes brought me within sight of the large white
circle which marks the landing-field at R----. J. B. had not yet
arrived. This was a great disappointment, for we had planned a race
home. I was anxious about him, too, knowing that the godfather of all
adventurers can be very stern at times, particularly with his aerial
godchildren. I waited for an hour and then decided to go on alone. The
weather having cleared, the opportunity was too favorable to be lost.
The cloud formations were the most remarkable that I had ever seen. I
flew around and over and under them, watching at close hand the play
of light and shade over their great, billowing folds. Sometimes I
skirted them so closely that the current of air from my propeller
raveled out fragments of shining vapor, which streamed into the clear
spaces like wisps of filmy silk. I knew that I ought to be savoring
this experience, but for some reason I couldn't. One usually pays for
a fine mood by a sudden and unaccountable change of feeling which
shades off into a kind of dull, colorless depression.
I passed a twin-motor Caudron going in the opposite direction. It was
fantastically painted, the wings a bright yellow and the circular
hoods, over the two motors, a fiery red. As it approached, it looked
like some prehistoric bird with great ravenous eyes. The thing
startled me, not so much because of its weird appearance as by the
mere fact of its being there. Strangely enough, for a moment it seemed
impossible that I should meet another _avion_. Despite a long
apprenticeship in aviation, in these days when one's mind has only
begun to grasp the fact that the mastery of the air has been
accomplished, the sudden presentation of a bit of evidence sometimes
shocks it into a moment of amazement bordering upon incredulity.