to-morrow. Porter is trying to give Irving a light from his own
cigarette. Irving, who doesn't know the meaning of nerves, asks him
who in hell he is waving at. Poor old Porter! His usefulness as a
combat pilot has long past, but he hangs on, doing the best he can. He
should have been sent to the rear months ago.
The first phase of the battle is over. The French have taken eleven
thousand prisoners, and have driven the enemy from all the hills down
to the low ground along the canal. For the most part, we have been too
high above them to see the infantry actions; but knowing the plans and
the objectives beforehand, we have been able to follow, quite closely,
the progress of the battle.
It opened on a wet morning with the clouds very low. We were to have
gone on patrol immediately the attack commenced, but this was
impossible. About nine o'clock the rain stopped, and Rodman and Davis
were sent out to learn weather conditions over the lines. They came
back with the report that flying was possible at two hundred metres.
This was too low an altitude to serve any useful purpose, and the
commandant gave us orders to stand by.
About noon the clouds began to break up, and both high and low patrols
prepared to leave the ground. Drew, Dunham, and I were on high patrol,
with Lieutenant Barry leading. Our orders were to go up through the
clouds, using them as cover for making surprise attacks upon enemy
_réglage_ machines. We were also to attack any enemy formations
sighted within three kilometres of their old first lines. The clouds
soon disappeared and so we climbed to forty-five hundred metres and
lay in wait for combat patrols.
Barry sighted one and signaled. Before I had placed it, he dived,
almost full motor, I believe, for he dropped like a stone. We went
down on his tail and saw him attack the topmost of three Albatross
single-seaters. The other two dived at once, far into their own lines.
Dunham, Drew, and I took long shots at them, but they were far outside
effective range. The topmost German made a feeble effort to maneuver
for position. Barry made a _renversement_ with the utmost nicety of
judgment and came out of it about thirty metres behind and above the
Albatross. He fired about twenty shots, when the German began falling
out of control, spinning round and round, then diving straight, then
past the vertical, so that we could see the silver under-surface of
his wings and tail, spinning again until we lost sight of him.[1]
[Footnote 1: This combat was seen from the ground, and
Barry's victory was confirmed before we returned to the
field.]
Lieutenant Talbott joined us as we were taking our height again. He
took command of the patrol and Barry went off hunting by himself, as
he likes best to do. There were planes everywhere, of both
nationalities. Mounting to four thousand metres within our own lines,
we crossed over again, and at that moment I saw a Letord, a
three-passenger _réglage_ machine, burst into flames and fall. There
was no time either to watch or to think of this horrible sight. We
encountered a patrol of five Albatross planes almost on our level.
Talbott dived at once. I was behind him and picked a German who was
spiraling either upward or downward, for a few seconds I was not sure
which. It was upward. He was climbing to offer combat. This was
disconcerting. It always is to a green pilot. If your foe is running,
you may be sure he is at least as badly rattled as you are. If he is a
single-seater and climbing, you may be equally certain that he is not
a novice, and that he has plenty of sand. Otherwise he would not
accept battle at a disadvantage in the hope of having his inning next.
I was foolish enough to begin firing while still about three hundred
metres distant. My opponent ungraciously offered the poorest kind of a
target, getting out of the range of my sights by some very skillful
maneuvering. I didn't want him to think that he had an inexperienced
pilot to deal with. Therefore, judging my distance very carefully, I
did a _renversement_ in the Lieutenant Barry fashion. But it was not
so well done. Instead of coming out of it above and behind the
German, when I pulled up in _ligne de vol_ I was under him!
I don't know exactly what happened then, but the next moment I was
falling in a _vrille_ (spinning nose dive) and heard the well-known
crackling sound of machine-gun fire. I kept on falling in a _vrille_,
thinking this would give the German the poorest possible target.[2]
[Footnote 2: A mistake which many new pilots make. In a
_vrille_, the machine spins pretty nearly on its own axis,
and although it is turning, a skillful pilot above it can
keep it fairly well within the line of his sights.]
Pulling up in _ligne de vol_ I looked over my shoulder again. The
German had lost sight of me for a moment in the swiftness of his dive,
but evidently he saw me just before I pulled out of the _vrille_. He
was turning up for another shot, in exactly the same position in which
I had last seen him. And he was very close, not more than fifty metres
distant.
I believed, of course, that I was lost; and why that German didn't bag
me remains a mystery. Heaven knows I gave him opportunity enough! In
the end, by the merciful intervention of Chance, our godfather, I
escaped. I have said that the sky had cleared. But there was one
strand of cloud left, not very broad, not very long; but a
refuge,--oh! what a welcome refuge! It was right in my path and I
tumbled into it, literally, head over heels. I came skidding out, but
pulled up, put on my motor, and climbed back at once; and I kept
turning round and round in it for several minutes. If the German had
waited, he must have seen me raveling it out like a cat tangled in a
ball of cotton. I thought that he was waiting. I even expected him to
come nosing into it, in search of me. In that case there would have
been a glorious smash, for there wasn't room for two of us. I almost
hoped that he would try this. If I couldn't bag a German with my gun,
the next best thing was to run into him and so be gathered to my
fathers while he was being gathered to his. There was no crash, and
taking sudden resolution, I dived vertically out of the cloud, head
over shoulder, expecting to see my relentless foe. He was nowhere in
sight.
In that wild tumble, and while chasing my tail in the cloud, I lost my
bearings. The compass, which was mounted on a swinging holder, had
been tilted upside down. It stuck in that position. I could not get
it loose. I had fallen to six hundred metres, so that I could not get
a large view of the landscape. Under the continuous bombardment the
air was filled with smoke, and through it nothing looked familiar. I
knew the direction of our lines by the position of the sun, but I was
in a suspicious mood. My motor, which I had praised to the heavens to
the other pilots, had let me down at a critical moment. The sun might
be ready to play some fantastic trick. I had to steer by it, although
I was uneasy until I came within sight of our observation balloons. I
identified them as French by sailing close to one of them so that I
could see the tricolor pennant floating out from a cord on the bag.
Then, being safe, I put my old Spad through every antic we two had
ever done together. The observers in the balloons must have thought me
crazy, a pilot running amuck from aerial shell shock. I had discovered
a new meaning for that "grand and glorious feeling" which is so often
the subject of Briggs's cartoons.
Looking at my watch I received the same old start of surprise upon
learning how much of wisdom one may accumulate in a half-hour of
aerial adventure. I had still an hour and a half to get through with
before I could go home with a clear conscience. Therefore, taking
height again, I went cautiously, gingerly, watchfully, toward the
lines.
X
"MAIS OUI, MON VIEUX!"
The "grand and glorious feeling" is one of the finest compensations
for this uncertain life in the air. One has it every time he turns
from the lines toward--home! It comes in richer glow, if hazardous
work has been done, after moments of strain, uncertainty, when the
result of a combat sways back and forth; and it gushes up like a
fountain, when, after making a forced landing in what appears to be
enemy territory, you find yourself among friends.
Late this afternoon we started, four of us, with Davis as leader, to
make the usual two-hour sortie over the lines. No Germans were
sighted, and after an uneventful half-hour, Davis, who is always
springing these surprises, decided to stalk them in their lairs. The
clouds were at the right altitude for this, and there were gaps in
them over which we could hover, examining roads, railroads, villages,
cantonments. The danger of attack was negligible. We could easily
escape any large hostile patrol by dodging into the clouds. But the
wind was unfavorable for such a reconnaissance. It was blowing into
Germany. We would have it dead against us on the journey home.
We played about for a half-hour, blown by a strong wind farther into
Germany than we knew. We walked down the main street of a village
where we saw a large crowd of German soldiers, spraying bullets among
them, then climbed into the clouds before a shot could be fired at us.
Later we nearly attacked a hospital, mistaking it for an aviation
field. It was housed in _bessonneau_ hangars, and had none of the
marks of a hospital excepting a large red cross in the middle of the
field. Fortunately we saw this before any of us had fired, and passed
on over it at a low altitude to attack a train. There is a good deal
of excitement in an expedition of this kind, and soldiers themselves
say that surprise sorties from the air have a demoralizing effect upon
troops. But as a form of sport, there is little to be said for it. It
is too unfair. For this reason, among others, I was glad when Davis
turned homeward.
While coming back I climbed to five thousand metres, far above the
others, and lagged a long way behind them. This was a direct violation
of patrol discipline, and the result was, that while cruising
leisurely along, with motor throttled down, watching the swift changes
of light over a wide expanse of cloud, I lost sight of the group. Then
came the inevitable feeling of loneliness, and the swift realization
that it was growing late and that I was still far within enemy
country.
I held a southerly course, estimating, as I flew, the velocity of the
wind which had carried us into Germany, and judging from this estimate
the length of time I should need to reach our lines. When satisfied
that I had gone far enough, I started down. Below the clouds it was
almost night, so dark that I could not be sure of my location. In the
distance I saw a large building, brilliantly lighted. This was
evidence enough that I was a good way from the lines. Unshielded
windows were never to be seen near the front. I spiraled slowly down
over this building, examining, as well as I could, the ground behind
it, and decided to risk a landing. A blind chance and blind luck
attended it. In broad day, Drew hit the only post in a field five
hundred metres wide. At night, a very dark night, I missed colliding
with an enormous factory chimney (a matter of inches), glided over a
line of telegraph wires, passed at a few metres' height over a field
littered with huge piles of sugar beets, and settled, _comme une
fleur_, in a little cleared space which I could never have judged
accurately had I known what I was doing.
Shadowy figures came running toward me. Forgetting, in the joy of so
fortunate a landing, my anxiety of a moment before, I shouted out,
"Bonsoir, messieurs!" Then I heard some one say, "Ich glaube--" losing
the rest of it in the sound of tramping feet and an undercurrent of
low, guttural murmurs. In a moment my Spad was surrounded by a
widening circle of round hats, German infantrymen's hats.
Here was the ignoble end to my career as an airman. I was a prisoner,
a prisoner because of my own folly, because I had dallied along like a
silly girl, to "look at the pretty clouds." I saw in front of me a
long captivity embittered by this thought. Not only this: my Spad was
intact. The German authorities would examine it, use it. Some German
pilot might fly with it over the lines, attack other French machines
with my gun, my ammunition!
Not if I could help it! They stood there, those soldiers, gaping,
muttering among themselves, waiting, I thought, for an officer to tell
them what to do. I took off my leather gloves, then my silk ones under
them, and these I washed about in the oil under my feet. Then, as
quietly as possible, I reached for my box of matches.
"Qu'est-ce-que vous faites là? Allez! Vite!"
A tramping of feet again, and a sea of round hats bobbing up and down
and vanishing in the gloom. Then I heard a cheery "Ça va, monsieur?
Pas de mal?" By way of answer I lighted a match and held it out, torch
fashion. The light glistened on a round, red face and a long French
bayonet. Finally I said, "Vous êtes Français, monsieur?" in a weak,
watery voice.
"Mais oui, mon vieux! Mais oui!" this rather testily. He didn't
understand at first that I thought myself in Germany. "Do I look like
a Boche?"
Then I explained, and I have never heard a Frenchman laugh more
heartily. Then he explained and I laughed, not so heartily, a great
deal more foolishly.
I may not give my location precisely. But I shall be disclosing no
military secrets in saying that I am not in Germany. I am not even in
the French war-zone. I am closer to Paris than I am to the enemy
first-line trenches. In a little while the sergeant with the round red
face and the long French bayonet, whose guest I am for the night, will
join me here. If he were an American, to the manner born and bred, and
if he knew the cartoons of that man Briggs, he might greet me in this
fashion:--
"When you have been on patrol a long way behind the enemy lines,
shooting up towns and camps and railway trains like a pack of aerial
cowboys; when, on your way home, you have deliberately disobeyed
orders and loafed a long way behind the other members of your group in
order to watch the pretty sunset, and, as a punishment for this
æsthetic indulgence, have been overtaken by darkness and compelled to
land in strange country, only to have your machine immediately
surrounded by German soldiers; then, having taken the desperate
resolve that they shall not have possession of your old battle-scarred
_avion_ as well as of your person, when you are about to touch a match
to it, if the light glistens on a long French bayonet and you learn
that the German soldiers have been prisoners since the battle of the
Somme, and have just finished their day's work at harvesting beets to
be used in making sugar for French _poilus_--Oh, BOY! Ain't it a GRAND
AND GLORYUS FEELING?"
To which I would reply in his own memorable words,--
"Mais oui, mon vieux! Mais OUI!"
XI
THE CAMOUFLAGED COWS
Nancy, a moonlight night, and "les sales Boches encore." I have been
out on the balcony of this old hotel, a famous tourist resort before
the war, watching the bombardment and listening to the deep throb of
the motors of German Gothas. They have dropped their bombs without
doing any serious damage. Therefore, I may return in peace to my huge
bare room, to write, while it is still fresh in mind, "The Adventure
of the Camouflaged Cows."
For the past ten days I have been attached--it is only a temporary
transfer--to a French _escadrille_ of which Manning, an American, is a
member. The _escadrille_ had just been sent to a quiet part of the
front for two weeks' _repos_, but the day after my arrival orders came
to fly to Belfort, for special duty.
Belfort! On the other side of the Vosges Mountains, with the Rhine
Valley, the Alps, within view, within easy flying distance! And for
special duty. It is a vague order which may mean anything. We
discussed its probable meaning for us, while we were pricking out our
course on our maps.
"Protection of bombardment _avions_" was André's guess. "Night combat"
was Raynaud's. Every one laughed at this last hazard. "You see?" he
said, appealing to me, the newcomer. "They think I am big fool. But
wait." Then, breaking into French, in order to express himself more
fluently: "It is coming soon, _chasse de nuit_. It is not at all
impossible. One can see at night, a moonlight night, very clearly from
the air. They are black shadows, the other _avions_ which you pass,
but often, when the moonlight strikes their wings, they flash like
silver. We must have searchlights, of course; then, when one sees
those shadows, those great black Gothas, _vite! la lumière!_
Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop! C'est fini!"
The discussion of the possibility or impossibility of night combat
continued warmly. The majority of opinion was unfavorable to it: a
useless waste of gasoline; the results would not pay for the wear and
tear upon valuable fighting planes. Raynaud was not to be persuaded.
"Wait and see," he said. There was a reminiscent thrill in his voice,
for he is an old night bombarding pilot. He remembered with longing, I
think, his romantic night voyages, the moonlight falling softly on the
roofs of towns, the rivers like ribbons of silver, the forests patches
of black shadow. "Really, it is an adventure, a night bombardment."
"But how about your objectives?" I asked. "At night you can never be
sure of hitting them, and, well, you know what happens in French
towns."
"It is why I asked for my transfer to _chasse_," he told me afterward.
"But the Germans, the blond beasts! Do they care? Nancy, Belfort,
Châlons, Epernay, Rheims, Soissons, Paris,--all our beautiful towns! I
am a fool! We must pay them back, the Huns! Let the innocent suffer
with the guilty!"
He became a combat pilot because he had not the courage of his
conviction.
We started in flights of five machines, following the Marne and the
Marne Canal to Bar-le-Duc, then across country to Toul, where we
landed to fill our fuel tanks. Having bestowed many favors upon me for
a remarkably long period, our aerial godfather decided that I had been
taking my good fortune too much for granted. Therefore, he broke my
tail skid for me as I was making what I thought a beautiful
_atterrissage_. It was late in the afternoon, so the others went on
without me, the captain giving orders that I should join them, weather
permitting, the next day.
"Follow the Moselle until you lose it in the mountains. Then pick up
the road which leads over the Ballon d'Alsace. You can't miss it."
I did, nevertheless, and as always, when lost, through my own fault. I
followed the Moselle easily enough until it disappeared in small
branching streams in the heart of the mountains. Then, being certain
of my direction, I followed an irregular course, looking down from a
great height upon scores of little mountain villages, untouched by
war. After weeks of flying over the desolation of more northerly
sectors of the front, this little indulgence seemed to me quite a
legitimate one.
But my Spad (I was always flying tired old _avions_ in those days, the
discards of older pilots) began to show signs of fatigue. The pressure
went down. Neither motor nor hand pump would function, the engine
began to gasp, and, although I instantly switched on to my reserve
tank, it expired with shuddering coughs. The propeller, after making a
few spins in the reverse direction, stopped dead.
I had been in a most comfortable frame of mind all the way, for a long
cross-country aerial journey, well behind the zone of fire, is a
welcome relaxation after combat patrols. It is odd how quickly one's
attitude toward rugged, beautiful country changes, when one is faced
with the necessity of finding landing-ground there. The steep ravines
yawn like mouths. The peaks of the mountains are teeth--ragged,
sinister-looking teeth. Being at five thousand metres I had ample time
in which to make a choice--ample time, too, for wondering if, by a
miscalculation, I had crossed the trench lines, which in that region
are hardly visible from the air.
I searched anxiously for a wide valley where it would be possible to
land in safety. While still three thousand metres from the ground I
found one. Not only a field. There were _bessonneau_ hangars on it. An
aerodrome! A moment of joy,--"but German, perhaps!"--followed by
another of anxiety. It was quickly relieved by the sight of a French
reconnaissance plane spiraling down for a landing. I landed, too, and
found that I was only a ten-minutes' flight from my destination.
* * * * *
With other work to do, I did not finish the story of my adventure with
the camouflaged cows, and I am wondering now why I thought it such a
corking one. The cows had something to do with it. We were returning
from Belfort to Verdun when I met them. Our special duty had been to
furnish aerial protection to the King of Italy, who was visiting the
French lines in the Vosges. This done we started northward again. Over
the highest of the mountains my motor pump failed as before. I got
well past the mountains before the essence in my reserve tank gave
out. Then I planed as flatly as possible, searching for another
aviation field. There were none to be found in this region, rough,
hilly country, much of it covered with forests. I chose a miniature
sugar-loaf mountain for landing-ground. It appeared to be free from
obstacles, and the summit, which was pasture and ploughed land, seemed
wide enough to settle on.
I got the direction of the wind from the smoke blowing from the
chimneys of a near-by village, and turned into it. As I approached,
the hill loomed more and more steeply in front of me. I had to pull up
at a climbing angle to keep from nosing into the side of it. About
this time I saw the cows, dozens of them, grazing over the whole
place. Their natural _camouflage_ of browns and whites and reds
prevented my seeing them earlier. Making spectacular _virages_, I
missed collisions by the length of a match-stick. At the summit of the
hill, my wheels touched ground for the first time, and I bounded on,
going through a three-strand wire fence and taking off a post without
any appreciable decrease in speed. Passing between two large apple
trees, I took limbs from each of them, losing my wings in doing so. My
landing chassis was intact and my Spad went on down the reverse
slope--
"Like an embodied joy, whose race is just begun."
After crashing through a thicket of brush and small trees, I came to
rest, both in body and in mind, against a stone wall. There was
nothing left of my machine but the seat. Unscathed, I looked back
along the wreckage-strewn path, like a man who has been riding a
whirlwind in a wicker chair.
Now, I have never yet made a forced landing in strange country without
having the mayor of the nearest village appear on the scene very soon
afterward. I am beginning to believe that the mayors of all French
towns sit on the roofs of their houses, field-glasses in hand,
searching the sky for wayward aviators, and when they see one landing,
they rush to the spot on foot, on horseback, in old-fashioned family
phaetons, by means of whatever conveyance most likely to increase
expedition their municipality affords.
The mayor of V.-sur-I. came on foot, for he had not far to go. Indeed,
had there been one more cow browsing between the apple trees, I
should have made a last _virage_ to the left, in which case I should
have piled up against a summer pavilion in the mayor's garden. Like
all French mayors of my experience, he was a courteous, big-hearted
gentleman.
After getting his breath,--he was a fleshy man, and had run all the
way from his house,--he said, "Now, my boy, what can I do for you?"
First he placed a guard around the wreckage of my machine; then we had
tea in the summer pavilion, where I explained the reason for my sudden
visit. While I was telling him the story, I noticed that every window
of the house, which stood at one end of the garden, was crowded with
children's heads. War orphans, I guessed. Either that or the children
of a large family of sons at the front. He was the kind of man who
would take them all into his own home.