PENGUINS
Having simple civilian notions as
to the amount of time necessary for dressing, Drew
and I rose with the sound of the bugle on the following
morning. We had promised each other that we would
begin our new life in true soldier style, and so we
reluctantly hurried to the wash-house, where we shaved
in cold water, washed after a fashion, and then hurried
back to the unheated barrack-room. We felt refreshed,
morally and physically, but our heroic example seemed
to make no impression upon our fellow aviators, whether
French or American. Indeed, not one of them stirred
until ten minutes before time for the morning appel,
when, there was a sudden upheaval of blankets down
the entire length of the room. It was as though
the patients in a hospital ward had been inoculated
with some wonderful, instantaneous-health-giving virus.
Men were jumping into boots and trousers at the same
time, and running to and from the wash-house, buttoning
their shirts and drying their faces as they ran.
It must have taken months of experiment to perfect
the system whereby every one remained in bed until
the last possible moment. They professed to be
very proud of it, but it was clear that they felt
more at ease when Drew and I, after a week of heroic,
early-morning resolves, abandoned our daily test of
courage. We are all Doctor Johnsons at heart.
It was a crisp, calm morning an
excellent day for flying. Already the mechanicians
were bringing out the machines and lining them up in
front of the hangars, in preparation for the morning
work, which began immediately after appel.
Drew and I had received notice that we were to begin
our training at once. Solicitous fellow countrymen
had warned us to take with us all our flying clothes.
We were by no means to forget our goggles, and the
fur-lined boots which are worn over ordinary boots
as a protection against the cold. Innocently,
we obeyed all instructions to the letter. The
absurdity of our appearance will be appreciated only
by air-men. Novices begin their training, at a
Bleriot monoplane school, in Penguins low-powered
machines with clipped wings, which are not capable
of leaving the ground. We were dressed as we
would have no occasion to be dressed until we should
be making sustained flights at high altitudes.
Every one, Frenchmen and Americans alike, had a good
laugh at our expense, but it was one in which we joined
right willingly; and one kind-hearted adjudant-moniteur,
in order to remove what discomfiture we may have felt,
told us, through an interpreter, that he was sure
we would become good air-men. The très bon
pilote could be distinguished, in embryo, by the
way he wore his goggles.
The beginners’ class did not
start work with the others, owing to the fact that
the Penguins, driven by unaccustomed hands, covered
a vast amount of ground in their rolling sorties back
and forth across the field. Therefore Drew and
I had leisure to watch the others, and to see in operation
the entire scheme by means of which France trains her
combat pilots for the front. Exclusive of the
Penguin, there were seven classes, graded according
to their degree of advancement. These, in their
order, were the rolling class (a second-stage Penguin
class, in which one still kept on the ground, but
in machines of higher speed); the first flying class short
hops across the field at an altitude of two or three
metres; the second flying class, where one learned
to mount to from thirty to fifty metres, and to make
landings without the use of the motor; tour de
piste (A) flights about the aerodrome
in a forty-five horse-power Bleriot; tour de piste
(B) similar flights in a fifty horse-power
machine; the spiral class, and the brevet class.
Our reception committee of the day
before volunteered his services as guide, and took
us from one class to another, making comments upon
the nature of the work of each in a bewildering combination
of English and Americanized French. I understood
but little of his explanation, although later I was
able to appreciate his French translation of some
of our breezy Americanisms. But explanation was,
for the most part, unnecessary. We could see
for ourselves how the prospective pilot advanced from
one class to another, becoming accustomed to machines
of higher and higher power, “growing his wings”
very gradually, until at last he reached the spiral
class, where he learned to make landings at a given
spot and without the use of his motor, from an altitude
of from eight hundred to one thousand metres, losing
height in volplanes and serpentines. The
final tests for the military brevet were two cross-country
flights of from two hundred to three hundred kilometres,
with landings during each flight, at three points,
two short voyages of sixty kilometres each, and an
hour flight at a minimum altitude of two thousand
metres.
With all the activities of the school
taking place at once, we were as excited as two boys
seeing their first three-ring circus. We scarcely
knew which way to turn in our anxiety to miss nothing.
But my chief concern, in anticipation, had been this:
how were English-speaking élèves-pilotes to
overcome the linguistic handicap? My uneasiness
was set at rest on this first morning, when I saw how
neatly most of the difficulties were overcome.
Many of the Americans had no knowledge of French other
than that which they had acquired since entering the
French service, and this, as I have already hinted,
had no great utilitarian value. An interpreter
had been provided for them through the generosity
and kindness of the Franco-American Committee in Paris;
but it was impossible for him to be everywhere at once,
and much was left to their own quickness of understanding
and to the ingenuity of the moniteurs.
The latter, being French, were eloquent with their
gestures. With the additional aid of a few English
phrases which they had acquired from the Americans,
and the simplest kind of French, they had little difficulty
in making their instructions clear. Both of us
felt much encouraged as we listened, for we could understand
them very well.
As for the business of flying, as
we watched it from below, it seemed the safest and
simplest thing in the world. The machines left
the ground so easily, and mounted and descended with
such sureness of movement, that I was impatient to
begin my training. I believed that I could fly
at once, after a few minutes of preliminary instruction,
without first going through with all the tedious rolling
along the ground in low-powered machines. But
before the morning’s work was finished, I revised
my opinion. Accidents began to happen, the first
one when one of the “old family cuckoos,”
as the rolling machines were disdainfully called,
showed a sudden burst of old-time speed and left the
ground in an alarming manner.
It was evident that the man who was
driving it, taken completely by surprise, had lost
his head, and was working the controls erratically.
First he swooped upward, then dived, tipping dangerously
on one wing. In this sudden emergency he had
quite forgotten his newly acquired knowledge.
I wondered what I would do in such a strait, when one
must think with the quickness and sureness of instinct.
My heart was in my mouth, for I felt certain that
the man would be killed. As for the others who
were watching, no one appeared to be excited.
A moniteur near me said, “Oh, la la!
Il est perdu!” in a mild voice.
The whole affair happened so quickly that I was not
able to think myself into a similar situation before
the end had come. At the last, the machine made
a quick swoop downward, from a height of about fifty
metres, then careened upward, tipped again, and diving
sidewise, struck the ground with a sickening rending
crash, the motor going at full speed. For a moment
it stood, tail in air; then slowly the balance was
lost, and it fell, bottom up, and lay silent.
An enterprising moving-picture company
would have given a great deal of money to film that
accident. It would have provided a splendid dramatic
climax to a war drama of high adventure. Civilian
audiences would have watched in breathless, awe-struck
silence; but at a military school of aviation it was
a different matter. “Oh, la la! Il
est perdu!” adequately gauges the degree
of emotional interest taken in the incident.
At the time I was surprised at this apparent callousness,
but I understood it better when I had seen scores of
such accidents occur, and had watched the pilots,
as in this case, crawl out from the wreckage, and
walk sheepishly, and a little shaken, back to their
classes. Although the machines were usually badly
wrecked, the pilots were rarely severely hurt.
The landing chassis of a Bleriot is so strong that
it will break the force of a very heavy fall, and
the motor, being in front, strikes the ground first
instead of pinning the pilot beneath it.
To anticipate a little, in more than
four months of training at the Bleriot school there
was not a single fatality, although as many as eleven
machines were wrecked in the course of one working
day, and rarely less than two or three. There
were so many accidents as to convince me that Bleriot
training for novices is a mistake from the economic
point of view. The up-keep expense is vastly greater
than in double-command biplane schools, where the
student pilot not only learns to fly in a much more
stable machine, but makes all his early flights in
company with a moniteur who has his own set
of controls and may immediately correct any mistakes
in handling. But France is not guided by questions
of expense in her training of pilotes de châsse,
and opinion appears to be that single-command monoplane
training is to be preferred for the airman who is to
be a combat pilot. Certain it is that men have
greater confidence in themselves when they learn to
fly alone from the beginning; and the Bleriot, which
requires the most delicate and sensitive handling,
offers excellent preliminary schooling for the Nieuport
and Spad, the fast and high-powered biplanes which
are the avions de châsse above the French lines.
A spice of interest was added to the
morning’s thrills when an American, not to be
outdone by his French compatriot, wrecked a machine
so completely that it seemed incredible that he could
have escaped without serious injury. But he did,
and then we witnessed the amusing spectacle of an
American, who had no French at all, explaining through
the interpreter just how the accident had happened.
I saw his moniteur, who knew no English, grin
in a relieved kind of way when the American crawled
out from under the wreckage. The reception committee
whispered to me, “This is Pourquoi, the
best bawler-out we’ve got. ‘Pourquoi?’
is always his first broadside. Then he wades in
and you can hear him from one end of the field to the
other. Attendez! this is going to be rich!”
Both of them started talking at once,
the moniteur in French and the American in
English. Then they turned to the interpreter,
and any one witnessing the conversation from a distance
would have thought that he was the culprit. The
American had left the ground with the wind behind
him, a serious fault in an airman, and he knew it very
well.
“Look here, Pete,” he
said; “tell him I know it was my fault.
Tell him I took a Steve Brody. I wanted to see
if the old cuckoo had any pep in ’er. When
I ”
“Pourquoi? Nom
de Dieu! Qu’est-ce que
je vous aï dit? Jamais faire
comme ca! Jamais monter avec
lé vent en arrière! Jamais!
Jamais!”
The others listened in hilarious silence
while the interpreter turned first to one and then
to the other. “Tell him I took a Steve Brody.”
I wondered if he translated that literally. Steve
took a chance, but it is hardly to be expected that
a Frenchman would know of that daring gentleman’s
history. In this connection, I remember a little
talk on caution which was given to us, later, by an
English-speaking moniteur. It was after
rather a serious accident, for which the spirit of
Steve Brody was again responsible.
“You Americans,” he said,
“when you go to the front you will get the Boche;
but let me tell you, they will kill many of you.
Not one or two; very many.”
Accidents delayed the work of flying
scarcely at all. As soon as a machine was wrecked,
Annamites appeared on the spot to clear away the
debris and take it to the repair-shops, where the usable
portions were quickly sorted out. We followed
one of these processions in, and spent an hour watching
the work of this other department of aviation upon
which our own was so entirely dependent. Here
machines were being built as well as repaired.
The air vibrated with the hum of machinery, with the
clang of hammers upon anvils and the roar of motors
in process of being tested.
There was a small army of women doing
work of many kinds. They were quite apt at it,
particularly in the department where the fine strong
linen cloth which covers the wings was being sewn together
and stretched over the framework. There were
great husky peasant-women doing the hardest kind of
manual labor. In these latter days of the great
world-war, women are doing everything, surely, with
the one exception of fighting. It is not a pleasant
thing to see them, however strong they may be, doing
the rough, coarse work of men, bearing great burdens
on their backs as though they were oxen. There
must be many now whose muscles are as hard and whose
hands as horny as those of a stevedore. Several
months after this time, when we were transferred to
another school of aviation, one of the largest in Europe,
we saw women employed on a much larger scale.
They lived in barracks which were no better than our
own, not so good, in fact, and
roughed it like common soldiers.
Toward evening the wind freshened
and flying was brought to a halt. Then the Penguins
were brought from their hangars, and Drew and I, properly
dressed this time, and accompanied by some of the Americans,
went out to the field for our first sortie. As
is usual on such occasions, there was no dearth of
advice. Every graduate of the Penguin class had
a method of his own for keeping that unmanageable
bird traveling in a direct line, and every one was
only too willing to give us the benefit of his experience.
Finally, out of the welter of suggestions, one or
two points became clear: it was important that
one should give the machine full gas, and get the tail
off the ground. Then, by skillful handling of
the rudder, it might be kept traveling in the same
general direction. But if, as usually happened,
it showed willful tendencies, and started to turn
within its own length, it was necessary to cut the
contact, to prevent it from whirling so rapidly as
to overturn.
Never have I seen a stranger sight
than that of a swarm of Penguins at work. They
looked like a brood of prehistoric birds of enormous
size, with wings too short for flight. Most unwieldy
birds they were, driven by, or more accurately, driving
beginners in the art of flying; but they ran along
the ground at an amazing speed, zigzagged this way
and that, and whirled about as if trying to catch
their own tails. As we stood watching them, an
accident occurred which would have been laughable
had we not been too nervous to enjoy it. In a
distant part of the field two machines were rushing
wildly about. There were acres of room in which
they might pass, but after a moment of uncertainty,
they rushed headlong for each other as though driven
by the hand of fate, and met head-on, with a great
rending of propellers. The onlookers along the
side of the field howled and pounded each other in
an ecstasy of delight, but Drew and I walked apart
for a hasty consultation, for it was our turn next.
We kept rehearsing the points which we were to remember
in driving a Penguin: full gas and tail up at
once. Through the interpreter, our moniteur
explained very carefully what we were to do, and mounted
the step, to show us, in turn, the proper handling
of the gas manet and of the coupe-contact
button. Then he stepped down and shouted, “Allez!
en route!” with a smile meant to be reassuring.
I buckled myself in, fastened my helmet,
and nodded to my mechanic.
“Coupe, plein gaz,” he said.
“Coupe, plein gaz,” I repeated.
He gave the propeller a few spins to suck in the mixture.
“Contact, reduisez.”
“Contact, reduisez.”
Again he spun the propeller, and the
motor took. I pulled back my manet, full
gas, and off I went at what seemed to me then breakneck
speed. Remembering instructions, I pushed forward
on the lever which governs the elevating planes, and
up went my tail so quickly and at such an angle that
almost instinctively I cut off my contact. Down
dropped my tail again, and I whirled round in a circle my
first cheval de bois, as this absurd-looking
manoeuvre is called. I had forgotten that I had
a rudder. I was like a man learning to swim, and
could not yet cooerdinate the movements of my hands
and feet. My bird was purring gently, with the
propeller turning slowly. It seemed thoroughly
domesticated, but I knew that I had but to pull back
on that manet to transform it into a rampant
bird of prey. Before starting again I looked
about me, and there was Drew racing all over the field.
Suddenly he started in my direction as if the whole
force of his will was turned to the business of running
me down. Luckily he shut off his motor, and by
the grace of the law of inertia came to a halt when
he was within a dozen paces of me.
We turned our machines tail to tail
and started off in opposite directions, but in a moment
I was following hard after him. Almost it seemed
that those evil birds had wills of their own.
Drew’s turned as though it were angry at the
indignity of being pursued. We missed each other,
but it was a near thing, and, not being able to think
fast enough, I stalled my motor, and had to await
helplessly the assistance of a mechanic. Far
away, at our starting-point, I could see the Americans
waving their arms and embracing each other in huge
delight, and then I realized why they had all been
so eager to come with us to the field. They had
been through all this. Now they were having their
innings. I could hear them shouting, although
their voices sounded very thin and faint. “Why
don’t you come back?” they yelled.
“This way! Here we are! Here’s
your class!” They were having the time of their
vindictive lives, and knew very well that we would
go back if we could.
Finally we began to get the hang of
it, and we did go back, although by circuitous routes.
But we got there, and the moniteur explained
again what we were to do. We were to anticipate
the turn of the machine with the rudder, just as in
sailing a boat. Then we understood the difficulty.
In my next sortie, I fixed my eye upon the flag at
the opposite side of the field, and reached it without
a single cheval de bois. I could have
kissed the Annamite who was stationed there to
turn the machines which rarely came. I had mastered
the Penguin! I had forced my will upon it, compelled
it to do my bidding! Back across the field I
went, keeping a direct course, and thinking how they
were all watching, the moniteur, doubtless,
making approving comments. I reduced the gas
at the proper time, and taxied triumphantly up to
the starting-point.
But no one had seen my splendid sortie.
Now that I had arrived, no one paid the least attention
to me. All eyes were turned upward, and following
them with my own, I saw an airplane outlined against
a heaped-up pile of snow-white cloud. It was
moving at tremendous speed, when suddenly it darted
straight upward, wavered for a second or two, turned
slowly on one wing and fell, nose-down, turning round
and round as it fell, like a scrap of paper.
It was the vrille, the prettiest piece of aerial
acrobatics that one could wish to see. It was
a wonderful, an incredible sight. Only seven
years ago Bleriot crossed the English Channel, and
a year earlier the world was astonished at the exploits
of the Wright brothers, who were making flights, straight-line
flights, of from fifteen to twenty minutes’ duration!
Some one was counting the turns of
the vrille. Six, seven, eight; then the
airman came out of it on an even keel, and, nosing
down to gather speed, looped twice in quick succession.
Afterward he did the retournement, turning
completely over in the air and going back in the opposite
direction; then spiraled down and passed over our heads
at about fifty metres, landing at the opposite side
of the field so beautifully that it was impossible
to know when the machine touched the ground.
The airman taxied back to the hangars and stopped just
in front of us, while we gathered round to hear the
latest news from the front.
For he had left the front, this birdman,
only an hour before! I was incredulous at first,
for I still thought of distances in the old way.
But I was soon convinced. Mounted on the hood
was the competent-looking Vickers machine gun, with
a long belt of cartridges in place, and on the side
of the fuselage were painted the insignia of
an escadrille.
The pilot was recognized as soon as
he removed his helmet and goggles. He had been
a moniteur at the school in former days, and
was well known to some of the older Americans.
He greeted us all very cordially, in excellent English,
and told us how, on the strength of a hard morning’s
work over the lines, he had asked his captain for an
afternoon off that he might visit his old friends at
B .
As soon as he had climbed down, those
of us who had never before seen this latest type of
French avion de châsse, crowded round, examining
and admiring with feelings of awe and reverence.
It was a marvelous piece of aero-craftsmanship, the
result of more than two years of accumulating experience
in military aviation. It was hard to think of
it as an inanimate thing, once having seen it in the
air. It seemed living, intelligent, almost human.
I could readily understand how it is that airmen become
attached to their machines and speak of their fine
points, their little peculiarities of individuality,
with a kind of loving interest, as one might speak
of a fine-spirited horse.
While the mechanicians were grooming
this one, and replenishing the fuel-tanks, Drew and
I examined it line by line, talking in low tones which
seemed fitting in so splendid a presence. We climbed
the step and looked down into the compact little car,
where the pilot sat in a luxuriously upholstered seat.
There were his compass, his altimètre, his
revolution-counter, his map in its roller case, with
a course pricked out on it in a red line. Attached
to the machine gun, there was an ingenious contrivance
by means of which he fired it while still keeping
a steady hand on his controls. The gun itself
was fired directly through the propeller by means
of a device which timed the shots. The necessity
for accuracy in this timing device is clear, when
one remembers that the propeller turns over at a normal
rate of between fifteen hundred and nineteen hundred
revolutions per minute.
It was with a chastened spirit that
I looked from this splendid fighting ’plane,
back to my little three-cylinder Penguin, with its
absurd clipped wings and its impudent tail. A
moment ago it had seemed a thing of speed, and the
mastery of it a glorious achievement. I told
Drew what my feeling was as I came racing back to the
starting-point, and how brief my moment of triumph
had been. He answered me at first in grunts and
nods, so that I knew he was not listening. Presently
he began to talk about romance again, the “romance
of high adventure,” as he called it. “All
this” moving his arm in a wide gesture was
but an evidence of man’s unconquerable craving
for romance. War itself was a manifestation of
it, gave it scope, relieved the pent-up longings for
it which could not find sufficient outlet in times
of peace. Romance would always be one of the
minor, and sometimes one of the major causes for war,
indirectly of course, but none the less really; for
the craving for it was one reason why millions of men
so readily accepted war at the hands of the little
groups of diplomats who ruled their destinies.
Half an hour later, as we stood watching
the little biplane again climbing into the evening
sky, I understood, in a way, what he was driving at,
and with what keen anticipation he was looking forward
to the time when we too would know all that there
was to know of the joy of flight. Higher and
higher it mounted, now and then catching the sun on
its silver wings in a flash of light, growing smaller
and smaller, until it vanished in a golden haze, far
to the north. It was then four o’clock.
In an hour’s time the pilot would be circling
down over his aerodrome on the Champagne front.