BROUGHT DOWN
The preceding chapters of this journal
have been written to little purpose if it has not
been made clear that Drew and I, like most pilots
during the first weeks of service at the front, were
worth little to the Allied cause. We were warned
often enough that the road to efficiency in military
aviation is a long and dangerous one. We were
given much excellent advice by aviators who knew what
they were talking about. Much of this we solicited,
in fact, and then proceeded to disregard it item by
item. Eager to get results, we plunged into our
work with the valor of ignorance, the result being
that Drew was shot down in one of his first encounters,
escaping with his life by one of those more than miracles
for which there is no explanation. That I did
not fare as badly or worse is due solely to the indulgence
of that godfather of ours, already mentioned, who watched
over my first flights while in a mood beneficently
pro-Ally.
Drew’s adventure followed soon
after our first patrol, when he had the near combat
with the two-seater. Luckily, on that occasion,
both the German pilot and his machine-gunner were
taken completely off their guard. Not only did
he attack with the sun squarely in his face, but he
went down in a long, gradual dive, in full view of
the gunner, who could not have asked for a better
target. But the man was asleep, and this gave
J. B. a dangerous contempt for all gunners of enemy
nationality.
Lieutenant Talbott cautioned him.
“You have been lucky, but don’t get it
into your head that this sort of thing happens often.
Now, I’m going to give you a standing order.
You are not to attack again, neither of you are to
think of attacking, during your first month here.
As likely as not it would be your luck the next time
to meet an old pilot. If you did, I wouldn’t
give much for your chances. He would outmaneuver
you in a minute. You will go out on patrol with
the others, of course; it’s the only way to
learn to fight. But if you get lost, go back
to our balloons and stay there until it is time to
go home.”
Neither of us obeyed this order, and,
as it happened, Drew was the one to suffer. A
group of American officers visited the squadron one
afternoon. In courtesy to our guests, it was decided
to send out all the pilots for an additional patrol,
to show them how the thing was done. Twelve machines
were in readiness for the sortie, which was set for
seven o’clock, the last one of the day.
We were to meet at three thousand metres, and then
to divide forces, one patrol to cover the east half
of the sector and one the west.
We got away beautifully, with the
exception of Drew, who had motor-trouble and was five
minutes late in starting. With his permission
I insert here his own account of the adventure a
letter written while he was in hospital.
No doubt you are wondering what happened,
listening, meanwhile, to many I-told-you-so explanations
from the others. This will be hard on you,
but bear up, son. It might not be a bad
plan to listen, with the understanding as well as
with the ear, to some expert advice on how to bag the
Hun. To quote the prophetic Miller, “I’m
telling you this for your own good.”
I gave my name and the number of the
escadrille to the medical officer at the poste
de secours. He said he would ’phone
the captain at once, so that you must know before
this, that I have been amazingly lucky. I
fell the greater part of two miles count
’em, two! before I actually regained
control, only to lose it again. I fainted while
still several hundred feet from the ground; but
more of this later. Couldn’t sleep
last night. Had a fever and my brain went
on a spree, taking advantage of my helplessness.
I just lay in bed and watched it function.
Besides, there was a great artillery racket all
night long. It appeared to be coming from
our sector, so you must have heard it as well.
This hospital is not very far back and we get
the full orchestral effect of heavy firing.
The result is that I am dead tired to-day.
I believe I can sleep for a week.
They have given me a bed in the officers’
ward me, a corporal. It is because
I am an American, of course. Wish there
was some way of showing one’s appreciation for
so much kindness. My neighbor on the left
is a chasseur captain. A hand-grenade
exploded in his face. He will go through life
horribly disfigured. An old padre, with two
machine-gun bullets in his hip, is on the other
side. He is very patient, but sometimes
the pain is a little too much for him. To
a Frenchman, “Oh, la, la!” is an expression
for every conceivable kind of emotion. In
the future it will mean unbearable physical pain
to me. Our orderlies are two poilus,
long past military age. They are as gentle and
thoughtful as the nurses themselves. One
of them brought me lemonade all night long.
Worth while getting wounded just to have something
taste so good.
I meant to finish this letter a week
ago, but haven’t felt up to it. Quite
perky this morning, so I’ll go on with the tale
of my “heroic combat.” Only, first,
tell me how that absurd account of it got into
the “Herald”? I hope Talbott knows
that I was not foolish enough to attack six Germans
single-handed. If he doesn’t, please
enlighten him. His opinion of my common
sense must be low enough, as it is.
We were to meet over S
at three thousand metres, you remember, and to
cover the sector at five thousand until dusk.
I was late in getting away, and by the time I reached
the rendezvous you had all gone. There wasn’t
a châsse machine in sight. I ought
to have gone back to the balloons as Talbott
advised, but thought it would be easy to pick you
up later, so went on alone after I had got some
height. Crossed the lines at thirty-five
hundred metres, and finally got up to four thousand,
which was the best I could do with my rebuilt
engine. The Huns started shelling, but there were
only a few of them that barked. I went down
the lines for a quarter of an hour, meeting two
Sopwiths and a Letord, but no Spads. You
were almost certain to be higher than I, but my
old packet was doing its best at four thousand, and
getting overheated with the exertion. Had
to throttle down and pique several times
to cool off.
Then I saw you at least
I thought it was you about four kilometres
inside the German lines. I counted six machines,
well grouped, one a good deal higher than the
others and one several hundred metres below them.
The pilot on top was doing beautiful renversements
and an occasional barrel-turn, in Barry’s
manner. I was so certain it was our patrol
that I started over at once, to join you. It was
getting dusk and I lost sight of the machine lowest
down for a few seconds. Without my knowing
it, he was approaching at exactly my altitude.
You know how difficult it is to see a machine
in that position. Suddenly he loomed up in front
of me like an express train, as you have seen
them approach from the depths of a moving-picture
screen, only ten times faster; and he was firing
as he came. I realized my awful mistake,
of course. His tracer bullets were going by on
the left side, but he corrected his aim, and
my motor seemed to be eating them up. I
banked to the right, and was about to cut my
motor and dive, when I felt a smashing blow in the
left shoulder. A sickening sensation and
a very peculiar one, not at all what I thought
it might feel like to be hit with a bullet.
I believed that it came from the German in front
of me. But it couldn’t have, for he was
still approaching when I was hit, and I have
learned here that the bullet entered from behind.
This is the history of less than a
minute I’m giving you. It seemed much
longer than that, but I don’t suppose it was.
I tried to shut down the motor, but couldn’t
manage it because my left arm was gone.
I really believed that it had been blown off
into space until I glanced down and saw that it was
still there. But for any service it was to me,
I might just as well have lost it. There
was a vacant period of ten or fifteen seconds
which I can’t fill in. After that I knew
that I was falling, with my motor going full speed.
It was a helpless realization. My brain
refused to act. I could do nothing.
Finally, I did have one clear thought, “Am I
on fire?” This cut right through the fog,
brought me up broad awake. I was falling
almost vertically, in a sort of half vrille.
No machine but a Spad could have stood the strain.
The Huns were following me and were not far away,
judging by the sound of their guns. I fully
expected to feel another bullet or two boring
its way through. One did cut the skin of
my right leg, although I didn’t know this until
I reached the hospital. Perhaps it was well
that I did fall out of control, for the firing
soon stopped, the Germans thinking, and with
reason, that they had bagged me. Some proud Boche
airman is wearing an iron cross on my account.
Perhaps the whole crew of dare-devils has been
decorated. However, no unseemly sarcasm.
We would pounce on a lonely Hun just as quickly.
There is no chivalry in war in these modern days.
I pulled out of the spin, got the broom-stick
between my knees, reached over, and shut down
the motor with my right hand. The propeller
stopped dead. I didn’t much care, being
very drowsy and tired. The worst of it was
that I couldn’t get my breath. I was
gasping as though I had been hit in the pit of
the stomach. Then I lost control again and started
falling. It was awful! I was almost
ready to give up. I believe that I said,
out loud, “I’m going to be killed.
This is my last sortie.” At any rate,
I thought it. Made one last effort and came
out in ligne de vol, as nearly as I could judge,
about one hundred and fifty metres from the ground.
It was an ugly-looking place for landing, trenches
and shell-holes everywhere. I was wondering
in a vague way whether they were French or German,
when I fell into the most restful sleep I’ve
ever had in my life.
I have no recollection of the crash,
not the slightest. I might have fallen as
gently as a leaf. That is one thing to be
thankful for among a good many others. When I
came to, it was at once, completely. I knew
that I was on a stretcher and remembered immediately
exactly what had happened. My heart was
going pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat, and I could hardly breathe,
but I had no sensation of pain except in my chest.
This made me think that I had broken every bone
in my body. I tried moving first one leg,
then the other, then my arms, my head, my body.
No trouble at all, except with my left arm and
side.
I accepted the miracle without attempting
to explain it, for I had something more important
to wonder about: who had the handles of
my stretcher? The first thing I did was to open
my eyes, but I was bleeding from a scratch on
the forehead and saw only a red blur. I
wiped them dry with my sleeve and looked again.
The broad back in front of me was covered with mud.
Impossible to distinguish the color of the tunic.
But the shrapnel helmet above it was French!
I was in French hands. If ever I live long
enough in one place, so that I may gather a few
possessions and make a home for myself, on one
wall of my living-room I will have a bust-length portrait,
rear view, of a French brancardier, mud-covered
back and battered tin hat.
Do you remember our walk with Menault
in the rain, and the dejeuner at the restaurant
where they made such wonderful omelettes?
I am sure that you will recall the occasion, although
you may have forgotten the conversation. I have
not forgotten one remark of Menault’s apropos
of talk about risks. If a man were willing,
he said, to stake everything for it, he would
accumulate an experience of fifteen or twenty
minutes which would compensate him, a thousand times
over, for all the hazard. “And if you
live to be old,” he said quaintly, “you
can never be bored with life. You will have
something, always, very pleasant to think about.”
I mention this in connection with my discovery
that I was not in German hands. I have had
five minutes of perfect happiness without any
background no thought of yesterday or to-morrow to
spoil it.
I said, “Bonjour,
messieurs,” in a gurgling voice. The man
in front turned his
head sidewise and said,
“Tiens! Ca
va, monsieur l’aviateur?”
The other one said, “Ah,
mon vieux!” You know the inflection
they give this expression, particularly when it
means, “This is something wonderful!”
He added that they had seen the combat and my
fall, and little expected to find the pilot living,
to say nothing of speaking. I hoped that they
would go on talking, but I was being carried
along a trench; they had to lift me shoulder-high
at every turn, and needed all their energy.
The Germans were shelling the lines. Several
fell fairly close, and they brought me down a
long flight of wooden steps into a dugout to
wait until the worst of it should be over.
While waiting, they told me that I had fallen
just within the first-line trenches, at a spot where
a slight rise in ground hid me from sight of the
enemy. Otherwise, they might have had a
bad time rescuing me. My Spad was completely
wrecked. It fell squarely into a trench, the
wings breaking the force of the fall. Before reaching
the ground, I turned, they said, and was making
straight for Germany. Fifty metres higher,
and I would have come down in No Man’s
Land.
For a long time we listened in silence
to the subdued crr-ump, crr-ump,
of the shells. Sometimes showers of earth
pattered down the stairway, and we would hear the
high-pitched, droning V-z-z-z of pieces
of shell-casing as they whizzed over the opening.
One of them would say, “Not far, that one”;
or, “He’s looking for some one, that fellow,”
in a voice without a hint of emotion. Then, long
silences and other deep, earth-shaking rumbles.
They asked me, several times, if I
was suffering, and offered to go on to the poste
de secours if I wanted them to. It was
not heavy bombardment, but it would be safer to wait
for a little while. I told them that I was ready
to go on at any time, but not to hurry on my
account; I was quite comfortable.
The light glimmering down the stairway
faded out and we were in complete darkness.
My brain was amazingly clear. It registered
every trifling impression. I wish it might always
be so intensely awake and active. There seemed
to be four of us in the dugout; the two brancardiers,
and this second self of mine, as curious as an
eavesdropper at a keyhole, listening intently
to everything, and then turning to whisper to
me. The brancardiers repeated the same
comments after every explosion. I thought:
“They have been saying this to each other
for over three years. It has become automatic.
They will never be able to stop.” I was
feverish, perhaps. If it was fever, it burned
away any illusions I may have had of modern warfare
from the infantryman’s viewpoint.
I know that there is no glamour in it for them; that
it has long since become a deadly monotony, an endless
repetition of the same kinds of horror and suffering,
a boredom more terrible than death itself, which
is repeating itself in the same ways, day after
day and month after month. It isn’t
often that an aviator has the chance I’ve had.
It would be a good thing if they were to send us into
the trenches for twenty-four hours, every few
months. It would make us keener fighters,
more eager to do our utmost to bring the war
to an end for the sake of those poilus.
The dressing-station was in a very
deep dugout, lighted by candles. At a table
in the center of the room the medical officer
was working over a man with a terribly crushed leg.
Several others were sitting or lying along the
wall, awaiting their turn. They watched
every movement he made in an apprehensive, animal
way, and so did I. They put me on the table next,
although it was not my turn. I protested, but
the doctor paid no attention. “Aviateur
americain,” again. It’s a pity
that Frenchmen can’t treat us Americans as
though we belong here.
As soon as the doctor had finished
with me, my stretcher was fastened to a two-wheeled
carrier and we started down a cobbled road to
the ambulance station. I was light-headed and
don’t remember much of that part of the journey.
Had to take refuge in another dugout when the
Huns dropped a shell on an ammunition-dump in
a village through which we were to pass.
There was a deafening banging and booming for a long
time, and when we did go through the town it was
on the run. The whole place was in flames
and small-arms ammunition still exploding.
I remember seeing a long column of soldiers going
at the double in the opposite direction, and they were
in full marching order.
Well, this is the end of the tale;
all of it, at any rate, in which you would be
interested. It was one o’clock in the morning
before I got between cool, clean sheets, and I was
wounded about a quarter past eight. I have
been tired ever since.
There is another aviator here, a Frenchman,
who broke his jaw and both legs in a fall while
returning from a night bombardment. His
bed is across the aisle from mine; he has a formidable-looking
apparatus fastened on his head and under his
chin, to hold his jaw firm until the bones knit.
He is forbidden to talk, but breaks the rule
whenever the nurse leaves the ward. He speaks
a little English and has told me a delightful
story about the origin of aerial combat. A French
pilot, a friend of his, he says, attached to a certain
army group during August and September, 1914, often
met a German aviator during his reconnaissance
patrols. In those Arcadian days, fighting
in the air was a development for the future,
and these two pilots exchanged greetings, not
cordially, perhaps, but courteously: a wave of
the hand, as much as to say, “We are enemies,
but we need not forget the civilities.”
Then they both went about their work of spotting
batteries, watching for movements of troops, etc.
One morning the German failed to return the salute.
The Frenchman thought little of this, and greeted
him in the customary manner at their next meeting.
To his surprise, the Boche shook his fist at
him in the most blustering and caddish way.
There was no mistaking the insult. They had passed
not fifty metres from each other, and the Frenchman
distinctly saw the closed fist. He was saddened
by the incident, for he had hoped that some of
the ancient courtesies of war would survive in
the aerial branch of the service, at least.
It angered him too; therefore, on his next reconnaissance,
he ignored the German. Evidently the Boche
air-squadrons were being Prussianized. The enemy
pilot approached very closely and threw a missile
at him. He could not be sure what it was,
as the object went wide of the mark; but he was
so incensed that he made a virage, and drawing
a small flask from his pocket, hurled it at his boorish
antagonist. The flask contained some excellent
port, he said, but he was repaid for the loss
in seeing it crash on the exhaust-pipe of the
enemy machine.
This marked the end of courtesy and
the beginning of active hostilities in the air.
They were soon shooting at each other with rifles,
automatic pistols, and at last with machine guns.
Later developments we know about. The night bombarder
has been telling me this yarn in serial form.
When the nurse is present, he illustrates the
last chapter by means of gestures. I am
ready to believe everything but the incident
about the port. That doesn’t sound plausible.
A Frenchman would have thrown his watch before
making such a sacrifice!