THE grand and glorious feelings is one of the finest
compensations for this uncertain life in the air. One has it every time he
turns from the lines toward home! It comes in richer glow, if hazardous
work has been done, after moments of strain, uncertainty, when the result of a
combat sways back and forth; and it gushes up like a fountain, when, after
making a forced landing in what appears to be enemy territory, you find
yourself among friends.
Late this afternoon we started, four of us, with Davis as
leader, to make the usual two-hour sortie over the lines. No Germans were
sighted, and after an uneventful half-hour, Davis, who Is always springing
these surprises, decided to stalk them in their lairs. The clouds were at the
right altitude for this, and there were gaps in them over which we could hover,
examining roads, railroads, villages, cantonments. The danger of attack was
negligible. We could easily escape any large hostile patrol by dodging into the
clouds. But the wind was unfavorable for such a reconnaissance. It was blowing
into Germany. We would have it dead against us on the journey home.
We played about for a half-hour, blown by a strong wind
farther into Germany than we knew. We walked down the main street of a village
where we saw a large crowd of German soldiers, spraying bullets among them,
then climbed into the clouds before a shot could be fired at us. Later we
nearly attacked a hospital, mistaking it for an aviation field. It was housed
in bessonneau hangars, and had none of the marks of a hospital excepting a
large red cross in the middle of the field. Fortunately we saw this before any
of us had fired, and passed on over it at a low altitude to attack a train.
There is a good deal of excitement in an expedition of this kind, and soldiers
themselves say that surprise sorties from the air have a demoralizing effect
upon troops. But as a form of sport, there is little to be said for it. It is
too unfair. For this reason, among others, I was glad when Davis turned
homeward. While coming back I climbed to five thousand metres, far above the
others, and lagged a long way behind them. This was a direct violation of
patrol discipline, and the result was, that while cruising leisurely along,
with motor throttled down, watching the swift changes of light over a wide
expanse of cloud, I lost sight of the group. Then came the inevitable feeling
of loneliness, and the swift realization that it was growing late and that I
was still far within enemy country.
I held a southerly course, estimating, as I flew, the
velocity of the wind which had carried us into Germany, and judging from this
estimate the length of time I should need to reach our lines. When satisfied
that I had gone far enough, I started down. Below the clouds it was almost
night, so dark that I could not be sure of my location. In the distance I saw a
large building, brilliantly lighted. This was evidence enough that I was a good
way from the lines. Unshielded windows were never to be seen near the front. I
spiraled slowly down over this building, examining, as well as I could, the
ground behind it, and decided to risk a landing. A blind chance and blind luck
attended it. In broad day. Drew hit the only post in a field five hundred
metres wide. At night, a very dark night, I missed colliding with an enormous
factory chimney (a matter of inches), glided over a line of telegraph wires,
passed at a few metres' height over a field littered with huge piles of sugar
beets, and settled, comme une fleur, in a little cleared space which I could
never have judged accurately had I known what I was doing.
Shadowy figures came running toward me. Forgetting, in the
joy of so fortunate a landing, my anxiety of a moment before, I shouted out,
"Bonsoir, messieurs!" Then I heard some one say, "Ich glaube " losing the
rest of it in the sound of tramping feet and an undercurrent of low, guttural
murmurs. In a moment my Spad was surrounded by a widening circle of round hats,
German infantrymen's hats.
Here was the ignoble end to my career as an airman. I was a
prisoner, a prisoner because of my own folly, because I had dallied along like
a silly girl, to "look at the pretty clouds." I saw in front of me a long
captivity embittered by this thought. Not only this: my Spad was intact. The
German authorities would examine it, use it. Some German pilot might fly with
it over the lines, attack other French machines with my gun, my ammunition!
Not if I could help it! They stood there, those soldiers,
gaping, muttering among themselves, waiting, I thought, for an officer to tell
them what to do. I took off my leather gloves, then my silk ones under them,
and these I washed about in the oil under my feet. Then, as quietly as
possible, I reached for my box of matches.
"Qu'est-ce-que vous faites la? Allez! Vite!" A tramping of
feet again, and a sea of round hats bobbing up and down and vanishing in the
gloom. Then I heard a cheery "Ca va, monsieur? Pas de mal?" By way of answer I
lighted a match and held it out, torch fashion. The light glistened on a round,
red face and a long French bayonet. Finally I said, " Vous etes Francais,
monsieur?" in a weak, watery voice. "Mais oui, mon vieux! Mais ouil" this
rather testily. He did n't understand at first that I thought myself in
Germany. "Do I look like a Boche?" Then I explained, and I have never heard a
Frenchman laugh more heartily. Then he explained and I laughed, not so
heartily, a great deal more foolishly.
I may not give my location precisely. But I shall be
disclosing no military secrets in saying that I am not in Germany. I am not
even in the French war-zone. I am closer to Paris than I am to the enemy
first-line trenches. In a little while the sergeant with the round red face and
the long French bayonet, whose guest I am for the night, will join me here.. If
he were an American, to the manner born and bred, and if he knew the cartoons
of that man Briggs, he might greet me in this fashion:
"When you have been on patrol a long way behind the enemy
lines, shooting up towns and camps and railway trains like a pack of aerial
cowboys; when, on your way home, you have deliberately disobeyed orders and
loafed a long way behind the other members of your group in order to watch the
pretty sunset, and, as a punishment for this aesthetic indulgence, have been
overtaken by darkness and compelled to land in strange country, only to have
your machine immediately surrounded by German soldiers; then, having taken the
desperate resolve that they shall not have possession of your old
battle-scarred avion as well as of your person, when you are about to touch a
match to it, if the light glistens on a long French bayonet and you learn that
the German soldiers have been prisoners since the battle of the Somme, and have
just finished their day's work at harvesting beets to be used in making sugar
for French poilus Oh, BOY! Ain't it a GRAND AND GLORYUS FEELING?"
To which I would reply in his own memorable words,
"Mais oui, mon vieux! Mais Oui!"
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