ONE HUNDRED HOURS
A little more than a year after our
first meeting in the Paris restaurant which has so
many pleasant memories for us, Drew completed his
first one hundred hours of flight over the lines, an
event in the life of an airman which calls for a celebration
of some sort. Therefore, having been granted
leave for the afternoon, the two of us came into the
old French town of Bar-lé-Duc, by the toy
train which wanders down from the Verdun sector.
We had dinner in one of those homelike little places
where the food is served by the proprietor himself.
On this occasion it was served hurriedly, and the bill
presented promptly at eight o’clock. Our
host was very sorry, but “les sales Boches,
vous savez, messieurs?” They had come the
night before: a dozen houses destroyed, women
and children killed and maimed. With a full moon
to guide them, they would be sure to return to-night.
“Ah, cette guerre! Quand
sera-t-elle finie?” He offered us a refuge
until our train should leave. Usually, he said,
he played solitaire while waiting for the Germans,
but with houses tumbling about one’s ears, he
much preferred company. “And my wife and
I are old people. She is very deaf, heureusement.
She hears nothing.”
J. B. declined the invitation.
“A brave way that would be to finish our evening!”
he said as we walked down the silent street. “I
wanted to say, ’Monsieur, I have just finished
my first one hundred hours of flight at the front.’
But he wouldn’t have known what that means.”
I said, “No, he wouldn’t
have known.” Then we had no further talk
for about two hours. A few soldiers, late arrivals,
were prowling about in the shadow of the houses, searching
for food and a warm kitchen where they might eat it.
Some insistent ones pounded on the door of a restaurant
far in the distance.
“Dites donc, patron!
Nous avons faim, nom de Dieu!
Est-ce-que tout lé monde
est mort ici?”
“Only
a host of phantom listeners,
That dwelt in the lone house
then,
Stood listening in the quiet
of the moonlight
To that voice from the world
of men.”
It was that kind of silence, profound,
tense, ghostlike. We walked through street after
street, from one end of the town to the other, and
saw only one light, a faint glimmer which came from
a slit of a cellar window almost on the level of the
pavement. We were curious, no doubt. At
any rate, we looked in. A woman was sitting on
a cot bed with her arms around two little children.
They were snuggled up against her and both fast asleep;
but she was sitting very erect, in a strained, listening
attitude, staring straight before her. Since that
night we have believed, both of us, that if wars can
be won only by haphazard night bombardments of towns
where there are women and children, then they had
far better be lost.
But I am writing a journal of high
adventure of a cleaner kind, in which all the resources
in skill and cleverness of one set of men are pitted
against those of another set. We have no bomb-dropping
to do, and there are but few women and children living
in the territory over which we fly. One hundred
hours is not a great while as time is measured on
the ground, but in terms of combat patrols, the one
hundredth part of it has held more of an adventure
in the true meaning of the word than we have had during
the whole of our lives previously.
At first we were far too busy learning
the rudiments of combat to keep an accurate record
of flying time. We thought our aeroplane clocks
convenient pieces of equipment rather than necessary
ones. I remember coming down from my first air
battle and the breathless account I gave of it at
the bureau, breathless and vague. Lieutenant Talbott
listened quietly, making out the compte rendu
as I talked. When I had finished, he emphasized
the haziness of my answers to his questions by quoting
them: “Region: ‘You know, that
big wood!’ Time: ’This morning, of
course!’ Rounds fired: ‘Oh, a lot!’”
etc.
Not until we had been flying for a
month or more did we learn how to make the right use
of our clocks and of our eyes while in the air.
We listened with amazement to after-patrol talk at
the mess. We learned more of what actually happened
on our sorties, after they were over than while they
were in progress. All of the older pilots missed
seeing nothing which there was to see. They reported
the numbers of the enemy planes encountered, the types,
where seen and when. They spotted batteries,
trains in stations back of the enemy lines, gave the
hour precisely, reported any activity on the roads.
In moments of exasperation Drew would say, “I
think they are stringing us! This is all a put-up
job!” Certainly this did appear to be the case
at first. For we were air-blind. We saw
little of the activity all around us, and details
on the ground had no significance. How were we
to take thought of time and place and altitude, note
the peculiarities of enemy machines, count their numbers,
and store all this information away in memory at the
moment of combat? This was a great problem.
“What I need,” J. B. used
to say, “is a traveling private secretary.
I’ll do the fighting and he can keep the diary.”
I needed one, too, a man air-wise
and battle-wise, who could calmly take note of my
clock, altimeter, temperature and pressure dials,
identify exactly the locality on my map, count the
numbers of the enemy, estimate their approximate altitude, all
this when the air was criss-crossed with streamers
of smoke from machine-gun tracer bullets, and opposing
aircraft were maneuvering for position, diving and
firing at each other, spiraling, nose-spinning, wing-slipping,
climbing, in a confusing intermingling of tricolor
cocards and black crosses.
We made gradual progress, the result
being that our patrols became a hundred-fold more
fascinating, sometimes, in fact, too much so.
It was important that we should be able to read the
ground, but more important still to remember that
what was happening there was only of secondary concern
to us. Often we became absorbed in watching what
was taking place below us, to the exclusion of any
thought of aerial activity, our chances for attack
or of being attacked. The view, from the air,
of a heavy bombardment, or of an infantry attack under
cover of barrage fires, is a truly terrible spectacle,
and in the air one has a feeling of detachment which
is not easily overcome.
Yet it must be overcome, as I have
said, and cannot say too many times for the benefit
of any young airman who may read this journal.
During an offensive the air swarms with planes.
They are at all altitudes, from the lowest artillery
réglage machines at a few hundreds of metres,
to the highest avions de châsse at six thousand
meters and above. Reglage, photographic, and
reconnaissance planes have their particular work to
do. They defend themselves as best they can, but
almost never attack. Combat avions, on
the other hand; are always looking for victims.
They are the ones chiefly dangerous to the unwary
pursuit pilot.
Drew’s first official victory
came as the result of a one-sided battle with an Albatross
single-seater, whose pilot evidently did not know
there was an enemy within miles of him. No more
did J. B. for that matter. “It was pure
accident,” he told me afterward. He had
gone from Rheims to the Argonne forest without meeting
a single German. “And I didn’t want
to meet one; for it was Thanksgiving Day. It has
associations for me, you know. I’m a New
Englander.” It is not possible to convince
him that it has any real significance for men who
were not born on the North Atlantic seaboard.
Well, all the way he had been humming
“Over the river and
through the wood
To grandfather’s house
we go,”
to himself. It is easy to understand
why he didn’t want to meet a German. He
must have been in a curiously mixed frame of mind.
He covered the sector again and passed over Rheims,
going northeast. Then he saw the Albatross; “and
if you had been standing on one of the towers of the
cathedral you would have seen a very unequal battle.”
The German was about two kilometres inside his own
lines, and at least a thousand metres below.
Drew had every advantage.
“He didn’t see me until
I opened fire, and then, as it happened, it was too
late. My gun didn’t jam!”
The German started falling out of
control, Drew following him down until he lost sight
of him in making a virage.
I leaned against the canvas wall of
a hangar, registering incredulity. Three times
out of seven, to make a conservative estimate, we fight
inconclusive battles because of faulty machine guns
or defective ammunition. The ammunition, most
of it that is bad, comes from America.
While Drew was giving me the details,
an orderly from the bureau brought word that an enemy
machine had just been reported shot down on our sector.
It was Drew’s Albatross, but he nearly lost official
credit for having destroyed it, because he did not
know exactly the hour when the combat occurred.
His watch was broken and he had neglected asking for
another before starting. He judged the time of
the attack, approximately, as two-thirty, and the infantry
observers, reporting the result, gave it as twenty
minutes to three. The region in both cases coincided
exactly, however, and, fortunately, Drew’s was
the only combat which had taken place in that vicinity
during the afternoon.
For an hour after his return he was
very happy. He had won his first victory, always
the hardest to gain, and had been complimented by the
commandant, by Lieutenant Nungesser, the Roi des
Aces, and by other French and American pilots.
There is no petty jealousy among airmen, and in our
group the esprit de corps is unusually fine.
Rivalry is keen, but each squadron takes almost as
much pride in the work of the other squadrons as it
does in its own.
The details of the result were horrible.
The Albatross broke up two thousand metres from the
ground, one wing falling within the French lines.
Drew knew what it meant to be wounded and falling out
of control. But his Spad held together.
He had a chance for his life. Supposing the German
to have been merely wounded An airman’s
joy in victory is a short-lived one.
Nevertheless, a curious change takes
place in his attitude toward his work, as the months
pass. I can best describe it in terms of Drew’s
experience and my own. We came to the front feeling
deeply sorry for ourselves, and for all airmen of
whatever nationality, whose lives were to be snuffed
out in their promising beginnings. I used to play
“The Minstrel Boy to the War Has Gone”
on a tin flute, and Drew wrote poetry. While
we were waiting for our first machine, he composed
“The Airman’s Rendezvous,” written
in the manner of Alan Seeger’s poem.
“And I in the wide fields
of air
Must keep with him my rendezvous.
It may be I shall meet him
there
When clouds, like sheep, move
slowly through
The pathless meadows of the
sky
And their cool shadows go
beneath,
I have a rendezvous with Death
Some summer noon of white
and blue.”
There is more of it, in the same manner,
all of which he read me in a husky voice. I,
too, was ready to weep at our untimely fate. The
strange thing is that his prophecy came so very near
being true. He had the first draft of the poem
in his breast-pocket when wounded, and has kept the
gory relic to remind him not that he needs
reminding of the airy manner in which he
canceled what ought to have been a bona-fide
appointment.
I do not mean to reflect in any way
upon Alan Seeger’s beautiful poem. Who
can doubt that it is a sincere, as well as a perfect,
expression of a mood common to all young soldiers?
Drew was just as sincere in writing his verses, and
I put all the feeling I could into my tin-whistle
interpretation of “The Minstrel Boy.”
What I want to make clear is, that a soldier’s
moods of self-pity are fleeting ones, and if he lives,
he outgrows them.
Imagination is an especial curse to
an airman, particularly if it takes a gloomy or morbid
turn. We used to write “To whom it may
concern” letters before going out on patrol,
in which we left directions for the notification of
our relatives and the disposal of our personal effects
in case of death. Then we would climb into our
machines thinking, “This may be our last sortie.
We may be dead in an hour, in half an hour, in twenty
minutes.” We planned splendidly spectacular
ways in which we were to be brought down, always omitting
one, however, the most horrible as well as the most
common, in flames. Thank Fortune,
we have outgrown this second and belated period of
adolescence and can now take a healthy interest in
our work.
Now, an inevitable part of the daily
routine is to be shelled, persistently, methodically,
and often accurately shelled. Our interest in
this may, I suppose, be called healthy, inasmuch as
it would be decidedly unhealthy to become indifferent
to the activities of the German anti-aircraft gunners.
It would be far-fetched to say that any airman ever
looks forward zestfully to the business of being shot
at with one hundred and fives; and seventy-fives,
if they are well placed, are unpleasant enough.
After one hundred hours of it, we have learned to
assume that attitude of contemptuous toleration which
is the manner common to all pilotes de châsse.
We know that the chances of a direct hit are almost
negligible, and that we have all the blue dome of
the heavens in which to maneuver.
Furthermore, we have learned many
little tricks by means of which we can keep the gunners
guessing. By way of illustration, we are patrolling,
let us say, at thirty-five hundred metres, crossing
and recrossing the lines, following the patrol leader,
who has his motor throttled down so that we may keep
well in formation. The guns may be silent for
the moment, but we know well enough what the gunners
are doing. We know exactly where some of the
batteries are, and the approximate location of all
of them along the sector; and we know, from earlier
experience, when we come within range of each individual
battery. Presently one of them begins firing in
bursts of four shells. If their first estimate
of our range has been an accurate one, if they place
them uncomfortably close, so that we can hear, all
too well, above the roar of our motors, the rending
Gr-r-rOW, Gr-r-rOW, of the shells as
they explode, we sail calmly to all outward
appearances on, maneuvering very little.
The gunners, seeing that we are not disturbed, will
alter their ranges, four times out of five, which
is exactly what we want them to do.
The next bursts will be hundreds of
metres below or above us, whereupon we show signs
of great uneasiness, and the gunners, thinking they
have our altitude, begin to fire like demons.
We employ our well-earned immunity in preparing for
the next series of batteries, or in thinking of the
cost to Germany, at one hundred francs a shot, of
all this futile shelling. Drew, in particular,
loves this cost-accounting business, and I must admit
that much pleasure may be had in it, after patrol.
They rarely fire less than fifty shells at us during
a two-hour patrol. Making a low general average,
the number is nearer one hundred and fifty. On
our present front, where aerial activity is fairly
brisk and the sector is a large one, three or four
hundred shells are wasted upon us often before we have
been out an hour.
We have memories of all the good batteries
from Flanders to the Vosges Mountains. Battery
after battery, we make their acquaintance along the
entire sector, wherever we go. Many of them, of
course, are mobile, so that we never lose the sport
of searching for them. Only a few days ago we
located one of this kind which came into action in
the open by the side of a road. First we saw
the flashes and then the shell-bursts in the same
cadence. We tipped up and fired at him in bursts
of twenty to thirty rounds, which is the only way
airmen have of passing the time of day with their
friends, the enemy anti-aircraft gunners, who ignore
the art of camouflage.
But we can converse with them, after
a fashion, even though we do not know their exact
position. It will be long before this chapter
of my journal is in print. Having given no indication
of the date of writing, I may say, without indiscretion,
that we are again on the Champagne front. We
have a wholesome respect for one battery here, a respect
it has justly earned by shooting which is really remarkable.
We talk of this battery, which is east of Rheims and
not far distant from Nogent l’Abbesse, and take
professional pride in keeping its gunners in ignorance
of their fine marksmanship. We signal them their
bad shots which are better than the good
ones of most of the batteries on the sector by
doing stunts, a barrel turn, a loop, two or three
turns of a vrille.
As for their good shots, they are
often so very good that we are forced into acrobacy
of a wholly individual kind. Our avions
have received many scars from their shells. Between
forty-five hundred and five thousand metres, their
bursts have been so close under us that we have been
lifted by the concussions and set down violently again
at the bottom of the vacuum; and this on a clear day
when a châsse machine is almost invisible at
that height, and despite its speed of two hundred
kilometres an hour. On a gray day, when we are
flying between twenty-five hundred and three thousand
metres beneath a film of cloud, they repay the honor
we do them by our acrobatic turns. They bracket
us, put barrages between us and our own lines, give
us more trouble than all the other batteries on the
sector combined.
For this reason it is all the more
humiliating to be forced to land with motor trouble,
just at the moment when they are paying off some old
scores. This happened to Drew while I have been
writing up my journal. Coming out of a tonneau
in answer to three coups from the battery,
his propeller stopped dead. By planing flatly
(the wind was dead ahead, and the area back of the
first lines there is a wide one, crossed by many intersecting
lines of trenches) he got well over them and chose
a field as level as a billiard table for landing-ground.
In the very center of it, however, there was one post,
a small worm-eaten thing, of the color of the dead
grass around it. He hit it, just as he was setting
his Spad on the ground, the only post in a field acres
wide, and it tore a piece of fabric from one of his
lower wings. No doubt the crack battery has been
given credit for disabling an enemy plane. The
honor, such as it is, belongs to our aerial godfather,
among whose lesser vices may be included that of practical
joking.
The remnants of the post were immediately
confiscated for firewood by some poilus who
were living in a dugout near by.