BY THE ROUTE OF
THE AIR
The winter of 1916-17 was the most
prolonged and bitter that France has known in many
years. It was a trying period to the little group
of Americans assembled at the Ecole Militaire
d’Aviation, eager as they were to complete their
training, and to be ready, when spring should come,
to share in the great offensive, which they knew would
then take place on the Western front. Aviation
is a waiting game at the best of seasons. In
winter it is a series of seemingly endless delays.
Day after day, the plain on the high plateau overlooking
the old city of V was storm-swept,
a forlorn and desolate place as we looked at it from
our windows, watching the flocks of crows as they beat
up against the wind, or as they turned, and were swept
with it, over our barracks, crying and calling derisively
to us as they passed.
“Birdmen do you call yourselves?”
they seemed to say. “Then come on up; the
weather’s fine!”
Well they knew that we were impostors,
fair-weather fliers, who dared not accept their challenge.
It is strange how vague and shadowy
my remembrance is of those long weeks of inactivity,
when we were dependent for employment and amusement
on our own devices. To me there was a quality
of unreality about our life at B .
Our environment was, no doubt, partly responsible
for this feeling. Although we were not far distant
from Paris, less than an hour by train, the
country round about our camp seemed to be quite cut
off from the rest of the world. With the exception
of our Sunday afternoons of leave, when we joined the
boulevardiers in town, we lived a life as remote
and cloistered as that of some brotherhood of monks
in an inaccessible monastery. That is how it
appeared to me, although here again I am in danger
of making it seem that my own impressions were those
of all the others. This of course was not true.
The spirit of the place appealed to us, individually,
in widely different ways, and upon some, perhaps, it
had no effect at all.
Sometimes we spent our winter afternoons
of enforced leisure in long walks through country
roads which lay empty to the eye for miles. They
gave one a sense of loneliness which colored thought,
not in any sentimental way, but in a manner very natural
and real. The war was always in the background
of one’s musings, and while we were far removed
from actual contact with it, every depopulated country
village brought to mind the sacrifice which France
has made for the cause of all freedom-loving nations.
Every roadside cafe, long barren of its old patronage,
was an evidence of the completeness of the sacrifice.
Americans, for the most part, are of an unconquerably
healthy cast of mind; but there were few of us who
could frequent these places light-heartedly.
Paris was our emotional storehouse,
to use Kipling’s term, during the time we were
at B . We spent our Sunday afternoons
there, mingling with the crowds on the boulevards,
or, in pleasant weather, sitting outside the cafes,
watching the soldiers of the world go by. The
streets were filled with permissionnaires from
all parts of the Western front, and there were many
of those despised of all the rest, the embusques,
as they are called, who hold the comfortable billets
in safe places well back of the lines. It was
very easy to distinguish them from the men newly arrived
from the trenches, in whose eyes one saw the look
of wonder, almost of unbelief, that there was still
a goodly world to be enjoyed. It was often beyond
the pathetic to see them trying to satisfy their need
for all the wholesome things of life in a brief seven
days of leave; to see the family parties at the modest
restaurants on the side streets, making merry in a
kind of forced way, as if every one were thinking
of the brevity of the time for such enjoyment.
Scarcely a week went by without bringing
one or two additional recruits to the Franco-American
Corps. We wondered why they came so slowly.
There must have been thousands of Americans who would
have been, not only willing, but glad to join us;
and yet the opportunities for doing so had been made
widely known. For those who did come this was
the legitimate by-product of glorious adventure and
a training in aviation not to be surpassed in Europe.
This was to be had by any healthy young American,
almost for the asking; but our numbers increased very
gradually, from fifteen to twenty-five, until by the
spring of 1917 there were fifty of us at the various
aviation schools of France. Territorially we
represented at least a dozen states, from the Atlantic
to the Pacific. There were rich men’s sons
and poor men’s sons among our number; the sons
of very old families, and those who neither knew nor
cared what their antecedents were.
The same was true of our French comrades,
for membership in the French air service is not based
upon wealth or family position or political influence.
The policy of the Government is as broad and democratic
as may be. Men are chosen because of an aptitude
that promises well, or as a reward for distinguished
service at the front. A few of the French élèves-pilotes
had been officers, but most of them N.C.O.’s
and private soldiers in infantry or artillery regiments.
This very wide latitude in choice at first seemed
“laxitude” to some of us Americans.
But evidently, experience in training war pilots, and
the practical results obtained by these men at the
front, have been proof enough to the French authorities
of the folly of setting rigid standards, making hard-and-fast
rules to be met by prospective aviators. As our
own experience increased, we saw the wisdom of a policy
which is more concerned with a man’s courage,
his self-reliance, and his powers of initiative, than
with his ability to work out theoretical problems
in aerodynamics.
There are many French pilots with
excellent records of achievement in war-flying who
have but a sketchy knowledge of motor and aircraft
construction. Some are college-bred men, but many
more have only a common-school education. It
is not at all strange that this should be the case,
for one may have had no technical training worth mentioning;
one may have only a casual speaking acquaintance with
motors, and a very imperfect idea of why and how one
is able to defy the law of gravity, and yet prove
his worth as a pilot in what is, after all, the best
possible way by his record at the front.
A judicious amount of theoretical
instruction is, of course, not wanting in the aviation
schools of France; but its importance is not exaggerated.
We Americans, with our imperfect knowledge of the
language, lost the greater part of this. The handicap
was not a serious one, and I think I may truthfully
say that we kept pace with our French comrades.
The most important thing was to gain actual flying
experience, and as much of it as possible. Only
in this way can one acquire a sensitive ear for motors,
and an accurate sense of flying speed: the feel
of one’s machine in the air. These are of
the greatest importance. Once the pilot has developed
this airman’s sixth sense, he need not, and
never does, worry about the scantiness of his knowledge
of the theory of flight.
Sometimes the winds would die away
and the thick clouds lift, and we would go joyously
to work on a morning of crisp, bright winter weather.
Then we had moments of glorious revenge upon the crows.
They would watch us from afar, holding noisy indignation
meetings in a row of weather-beaten trees at the far
side of the field. And when some inexperienced
pilot lost control of his machine and came crashing
to earth, they would take the air in a body, circling
over the wreckage, cawing and jeering with the most
evident delight. “The Oriental Wrecking
Company,” as the Annamites were called,
were on the scene almost as quickly as our enemies
the crows. They were a familiar sight on every
working day, chattering together in their high-pitched
gutturals, as they hauled away the wrecked machines.
They appeared to side with the birds, and must have
thought us the most absurd of men, making wings for
ourselves, and always coming to grief when we tried
to use them.
We made progress regardless of all
this skepticism. It was necessarily slow, for
beginners at a single-command monoplane school are
permitted to fly only under the most favorable weather
conditions. Even then, old Mother Earth, who
is not kindly disposed toward those of her children
who leave her so jauntily, would clutch us back to
her bosom, whenever we gave her the slightest opportunity,
with an embrace that was anything but tender.
We were inclined to think rather highly of our own
courage in defying her; and sometimes our vanity was
increased by our moniteurs. After an exciting
misadventure they often gave expression to their relief
at finding an amateur pilot still whole, by praising
his “presence of mind” in too generous
French fashion.
We should not have been so proud,
I think, of our own little exploits, had we remembered
those of the pioneers in aviation, so many of whom
lost their lives in experiment with the first crude
types of the heavier-than-air machines. They
were pioneers in the fine and splendid meaning of
the word men to be compared in spirit with
the old fifteenth-century navigators. We were
but followers, adventuring, in comparative safety,
along a well-defined trail.
This, at any rate, was Drew’s
opinion. He would never allow me the pleasure
of indulging in any flights of fancy over these trivial
adventures of ours. He would never let me set
them off against “the heroic background”
of Paris. As for Paris, we saw nothing of war
there, he would say, except the lighter side, the homecoming,
leave-enjoying side. We needed to know more of
the horror and the tragedy of it. We needed to
keep that close and intimate to us as a right perspective
for our future adventures. He believed it to be
our duty as aviators to anticipate every kind of experience
which we might have to meet at the front. His
imagination was abnormally vivid. Once he discussed
the possibility of “falling in flames,”
which is so often the end of an airman’s career.
I shall never again be able to take the same whole-hearted
delight in flying that I did before he was so horribly
eloquent upon the subject. He often speculated
upon one’s emotions in falling in a machine
damaged beyond the possibility of control.
“Now try to imagine it,”
he would say: “your gasoline tanks have
been punctured and half of your fuselage has
been shot away. You believe that there is not
the slightest chance for you to save your life.
What are you going to do lose your head
and give up the game? No, you’ve got to
attempt the impossible”; and so on, and so forth.
I would accuse him of being morbid.
Furthermore, I saw no reason why we should plan for
terrible emergencies which might never arrive.
His answer was that we were military pilots in training
for combat machines. We had no right to ignore
the grimness of the business ahead of us. If
we did, so much the worse for us when we should go
to the front. But beyond this practical interest,
he had a great curiosity about the nature of fear,
and a great dread of it, too. He was afraid that
in some last adventure, in which death came slowly
enough for him to recognize it, he might die like a
terror-stricken animal, and not bravely, as a man
should.
We did not often discuss these gruesome
possibilities, although this was not Drew’s
fault. I would not listen to him; and so he would
be silent about them until convinced that the furtherance
of our careers as airmen demanded additional unpleasant
imaginings. There was something of the Hindoo
fanatic in him; or perhaps it was the outcropping
of the stern spirit of his New England forbears.
But when he talked of the pleasant side of the adventures
before us, it was more than compensation for all the
rest. Then he would make me restless and impatient,
for I did not have his faculty of enjoyment in anticipation.
The early period of training, when we were flying only
a few metres above the ground, seemed endless.
At last came the event which really
marked the beginning of our careers as airmen:
the first tour de piste, the first flight round
the aerodrome. We had talked of this for weeks,
but when at last the day for it came, our enthusiasm
had waned. We were eager to try our wings and
yet afraid to make the start.
This first tour de piste was
always the occasion for a gathering of the Americans,
and there was the usual assembly present. The
beginners were there to shiver in anticipation of
their own forthcoming trials, and the more advanced
pilots, who had already taken the leap, to offer gratuitous
advice.
“Now don’t try to pull
any big league stuff. Not too much rudder on
the turns. Remember how that Frenchman piled up
on the Farman hangars when he tried to bank the corners.”
“You’ll find it pretty
rotten when you go over the woods. The air currents
there are something scandalous!”
“Believe me, it’s a lot
worse over the fort. Rough? Oh, la la!”
“And that’s where you
have to cut your motor and dive, if you’re going
to make a landing without hanging up in the telephone
wires.”
“When you do come down, don’t
be afraid to stick her nose forward. Scare the
life out of you, that drop will, but you may as well
get used to it in the beginning.”
“But wait till we see them redress!
Where’s the Oriental Wrecking Gang?”
“Don’t let that worry
you, Drew: pan-caking isn’t too bad.
Not in a Bleriot. Just like falling through a
shingle roof. Can’t hurt yourself much.”
“If you do spill, make it a
good one. There hasn’t been a decent smash-up
to-day.”
These were the usual comforting assurances.
They did not frighten us much, although there was
just enough truth in the warnings to make us uneasy.
We took our hazing as well as we could inwardly, and
of course with imperturbable calm outwardly; but,
to make a confession, I was somewhat reluctant to
hear the businesslike “Allez! en route!”
of our moniteur.
When it came, I taxied across to the
other side of the field, turned into the wind, and
came racing back, full motor. It seemed a thing
of tremendous power, that little forty-five-horsepower
Anzani. The roar of it struck awe into my soul,
and I gripped the controls in no very professional
manner. Then, when I had gathered full ground
speed, I eased her off gently, and up we went, over
the class and the assembled visitors, above the hangars,
the lake, the forest, until, at the halfway point,
my altimètre registered three hundred and fifty
metres. Out of the corner of my eye I saw all
the beautiful countryside spread out beneath me, but
I was too busily occupied to take in the prospect.
I was watching my wings, nervously, in order to anticipate
and counteract the slightest pitch of the machine.
But nothing happened, and I soon realized that this
first grand tour was not going to be nearly so bad
as we had been led to believe. I began to enjoy
it. I even looked down over the side of the fuselage,
although it was a very hasty glance.
All the time I was thinking of the
rapidly approaching moment when I should have to come
down. I knew well enough how the descent was to
be made. It was very simple. I had only
to shut off my motor, push forward with my “broom-stick,” the
control connected with the elevating planes, and
then wait and redress gradually, beginning at from
six to eight metres from the ground. The descent
would be exciting, a little more rapid than Shooting
the Chutes. Only one could not safely hold on
to the sides of the car and await the splash.
That sort of thing had sometimes been done in aeroplanes,
by over-excited pilots. The results were disastrous,
without exception.
The moment for the decision came.
I was above the fort, otherwise I should not have
known when to dive. At first the sensation was,
I imagine, exactly that of falling, feet foremost;
but after pulling back slightly on the controls, I
felt the machine answer to them, and the uncomfortable
feeling passed. I brought up on the ground in
the usual bumpy manner of the beginner. Nothing
gave way, however, so this did not spoil the fine
rapture of a rare moment. It was shared at
least it was pleasant to think so by my
old Annamite friend of the Penguin experience,
who stood by his flag nodding his head at me.
He said, “Beaucoup bon,” showing his polished
black teeth in an approving grin. I forgot for
the moment that “beaucoup bon” was
his enigmatical comment upon all occasions, and that
he would have grinned just as broadly had he been
dragging me out from a mass of wreckage.
Drew came in a few moments later,
making an almost perfect landing. In the evening
we walked to a neighboring village, where we had a
wonderful dinner to celebrate the end of our apprenticeship.
It was a curious feast. We had little to say
to one another, or, better, we were both afraid to
talk. We were under an enchantment which words
would have broken. After a silent meal, we walked
all the way home without speaking.
We started off together on our triangles.
That was in April, just passed, so that I have now
brought this casual diary almost up to date.
We were then at the great school of aviation at A
in central France, where, for the first time, we were
associated with men in training for every branch of
aviation service, and became familiar with other types
of French machines. But the brevet tests, which
every pilot must pass before he becomes a military
aviator, were the same in every department of the
school. The triangles were two cross-country
flights of two hundred kilometres each, three landings
to be made en route, and each flight to be completed
within forty-eight hours. In addition, there
were two short voyages of sixty kilometres each these
preceded the triangular tests and an hour
of flight at a minimum altitude of sixty-five hundred
feet.
The short voyages gave us a delightful
foretaste of what was to come. We did them both
one afternoon, and were at the hangars at five o’clock
on the following morning, ready to make an early start.
A fresh wind was blowing from the northeast, but the
brevet moniteur, who went up for a short flight
to try the air, came back with the information that
it was quite calm at twenty-five hundred feet.
We might start, he said, as soon as we liked.
Drew, in his joy, embraced the old
woman who kept a coffee-stall at the hangars, while
I danced a one-step with a mechanician. Neither
of them was surprised at this procedure. They
were accustomed to such emotional outbursts on the
part of aviators who, by the very nature of their
calling, were always in the depths of despair or on
the farthest jutting peak of some mountain of delight.
Our departure had been delayed, day after day, for
more than a week, because of the weather. We
were so eager to start that we would willingly have
gone off in a blizzard.
During the week of waiting we had
studied our map until we knew the location of every
important road and railroad, every forest, river,
canal, and creek within a radius of one hundred kilometres.
We studied it at close range, on a table, and then
on the floor, with the compass-points properly orientated,
so that we might see all the important landmarks with
the birdman’s eye. We knew our course so
well, that there seemed no possibility of our losing
direction.
Our military papers had been given
us several days before. Among these was an official-looking
document to be presented to the mayor of any town
or village near which we might be compelled to land.
It contained an extract from the law concerning aviators,
and the duty toward them of the civilian and military
authorities. In another was an itemized list
of the amounts which might be exacted by farmers for
damage to growing crops: so much for an atterrissage
in a field of sugar-beets, so much for wheat, etc.
Besides these, we had a book of detailed instructions
as to our duty in case of emergencies of every conceivable
kind among others, the course of action
to be followed if we should be compelled to land in
an enemy country. At first sight this seemed
an unnecessary precaution; but we remembered the experience
of one of our French comrades at B ,
who started confidently off on his first cross-country
flight. He lost his way and did not realize how
far astray he had gone until he found himself under
fire from German anti-aircraft batteries on the Belgian
front.
The most interesting paper of all
was our Ordre de Service, the text of which
was as follows:
It is commanded that the bearer of
this Order report himself at the cities of C
and R , by the route of the air,
flying an avion Caudron, and leaving the
Ecole Militaire d’Aviation at
A on the 21st of April, 1917, without
passenger on board.
Signed,
LE CAPITAINE B
Commandant
de l’Ecole.
We read this with feelings which must
have been nearly akin to those of Columbus on a memorable
day in 1492 when he received his clearance papers
from Cadiz. “By the route of the air!”
How the imagination lingered over that phrase!
We had the better of Columbus there, although we had
to admit that there was more glamour in the hazard
of his adventure and the uncertainty of his destination.
Drew was ready first. I helped
him into his fur-lined combination and strapped him
to his seat. A moment later he was off. I
watched him as he gathered height over the aerodrome.
Then, finding that his motor was running satisfactorily,
he struck out in an easterly direction, his machine
growing smaller and smaller until it vanished in the
early morning haze. I followed immediately afterward,
and had a busy ten minutes, being buffeted this way
and that, until, as the brevet moniteur had
foretold, I reached quiet air at twenty-five hundred
feet.
This was my first experience in passing
from one air current to another. It was a unique
one, for I was still a little incredulous. I
had not entirely lost my old boyhood belief that the
wind went all the way up.
I passed over the old cathedral town
of B at fifteen hundred 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 chateaux, 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, altimètre,
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 viseed
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.