Part 12

No nervous man is wanted in the air service, and the moment that a flier shows signs that his nerves are becoming affected he is given a furlough and ordered to take a rest. So great is the mental strain, the exposure, and the noise, however, that probably twenty-five per cent of the aviators lose their nerve completely and have to leave the service altogether. The great French aviation school at Buc, near Paris, turns out pilots at the rate of one hundred and sixty a month. The first lessons are given on a machine with clipped wings, known as “the penguin,” which cannot rise from the ground, and from this the men are gradually advanced, stage by stage, from machines as safe and steady and well-mannered as riding-school horses, until they at last become qualified pilots, capable of handling the quick-turning, uncertain-tempered broncos of the air. Provided he has sound nerves, a strong constitution, and average intelligence, a man who has never been in a machine before can become a qualified pilot in thirty days. Since the war began the French air service has attracted the reckless, the daring, and the adventurous from the four corners of the earth as iron filings are attracted by a magnet. Wearing on the collars of their silver-blue uniforms the gold wings of the flying corps are cow-punchers, polo-players, prize-fighters, professional bicycle riders, big-game hunters, soldiers of fortune, young men who bear famous names and other young men whose names are notorious rather than famous. In one squadrilla on the Champagne front I found a Texan cowboy and adventurer named Hall; Elliott Cowdin, the Long Island polo-player; and Charpentier, the heavyweight champion of France. For youngsters who are seeking excitement and adventure, no sport in the world can offer the thrills of the _chasse au Taube_. To drive with one hand a machine that travels through space at a speed double that of the fastest express-train and with the other hand to operate a mitrailleuse that spits death at the rate of a thousand shots a minute; to twist and turn and loop and circle two miles above the earth in an endeavor to overcome an adversary as quick-witted and quick-acting as yourself, knowing that if you are victorious the victory is due to your skill and courage alone—there you have a game which makes all other sports appear ladylike and tame.

When an aeroplane armed with a mitrailleuse attacks an enemy machine the pilot immediately manœuvres so as to permit the gunner observer to bring his gun into action. In order to make the bullets “spread” and insure that at least some of the many shots get home, the gunner swings his weapon up and down, with a kind of chopping motion, so that, viewed from the front of the machine, the stream of bullets, were they visible, would be shaped like a fan. At the same time the gunner swings his weapon gently round, covering with a stream of lead the space through which his enemy will have to pass. Should the enemy machine be below the other, then to get clear he would possibly dive under his opponent in a sweeping turn. By this manœuvre the gunner is placed in a position where he cannot bring his weapon to bear and he will have to turn in pursuit before his gun can be brought into action again. From this it will be seen that an aeroplane gunner does not take deliberate aim, as would a man armed with a rifle, but instead fills the air in the path of his opponent with showers of bullets in the hope that some of them will find the mark. Should both machines be armed with machine-guns, as is now nearly always the case, victory is often a question of quick manœuvring combined with a considerable element of luck. To win out in this aerial warfare, a man has to combine the quickness of a fencer with the coolness of a big-game shot.

[Illustration:

When the chickens come home to roost.

It is always a hazardous performance for an aeroplane to make a landing after nightfall, even when the ground is illumined by a search-light. ]

One of the greatest dangers the military aviator has to face is landing after night has fallen. Though every machine has a small motor, worked by the wind, which generates enough power for a small search-light, the light is not sufficiently powerful to be of much assistance in gauging the distance from the ground. Sunset is, therefore, always an anxious time on the aviation fields, nor is the anxiety at an end until all the fliers are accounted for. As the sun begins to sink into the west the returning aviators one by one appear, black dots against the crimson sky. One by one they come swooping down from the heavens and come to rest upon the ground. Twilight merges into dusk and dusk turns into darkness, but one of the flying men has not yet come. The four corners of the aviation field are marked with great flares of kerosene, that the late comer may be guided home, and down the middle of the field lanterns are laid out in the form of a huge arrow with the head pointing into the wind, while search-lights, mounted on motor-cars, alternately sweep field and sky with their white beams. Anxiety is written plainly on the face of every one. Have the Boches brought him down? Has he lost his way? Or has he been forced to descend elsewhere from engine trouble or lack of petrol? “Hark!” exclaims some one suddenly. “He’s coming!” and in the sudden hush that ensues you hear, from somewhere in the upper darkness, a motor’s deep, low throb. The vertical beams of the search-lights fall and flood the level plain with yellow radiance. The hum of the motor rises into a roar and then, when just overhead, abruptly stops, and down through the darkness slides a great bird which is darker than the darkness and settles silently upon the plain. The last of the chickens has come home to roost.

[Illustration:

Antiaircraft guns, posted outside the towns, are ready to give a warm reception to an aerial intruder. ]

In addition to the aeroplanes kept upon the front for purposes of bombardment, photography, artillery control, and scouting, several squadrillas are kept constantly on duty in the vicinity of Paris and certain other French cities for the purpose of driving off marauding _Taubes_ or Zeppelins. Just as the streets of Paris are patrolled by gendarmes, so the air-lanes above the city are patrolled, both night and day, by guarding aeroplanes. To me there was something wonderfully inspiring in the thought that all through the hours of darkness these aerial watchers were sweeping in great circles above the sleeping city, guarding it from the death that comes in the night. The people of the United States do not fully understand the Zeppelin raid problem with which those intrusted with the defense of Paris and of London are confronted. The Zeppelins, it must be remembered, never come out unless it is a very dark night, and then they pass over the lines at a height of two miles or more, descending only when they are above the city which they intend to attack. They slowly, silently settle down until their officers can get a view of their target and then the bombs begin to drop. This is usually the first warning that the townspeople have that Zeppelins are abroad, though it occasionally happens that they have been seen or heard crossing the lines, in which case the city is warned by telephone, the antiaircraft guns prepare for action, and the lights in the streets and houses are put out. Should the Zeppelins succeed in getting above the city, the guarding aeroplanes go up after them and as soon as the search-lights spot them the guns open fire with shrapnel. The raiders are rarely fired on by the antiaircraft guns while they are hovering over the city, however, as experience has shown that more people are killed by falling shell splinters than by the enemy’s bombs. Nor do the French aeroplanes dare to make serious attacks until the Zeppelin is clear of the city, for it is not difficult to imagine the destruction that would result were one of these monsters, five hundred feet long and weighing thirty-six thousand pounds, to be destroyed and its flaming débris to fall upon the city. The problem that faces the French authorities, therefore, is stopping the Zeppelins before they reach Paris, and it speaks volumes for the efficiency of the French air service that there has been no Zeppelin raid on the French capital for nearly a year.

In order to detect the approach of Zeppelins the French military authorities have recently adopted the novel expedient of establishing microphone stations at several points in and about Paris, these delicately attuned instruments recording with unfailing accuracy the throb of a Zeppelin’s or an aeroplane’s propellers long before it can be heard by the human ear.

For the protection of London the British Government has built an aerial navy consisting of two types of aircraft—scouts and battle-planes. Practically the only requirement for the scouting planes is that they must have a speed of not less than one hundred miles an hour and a fuel capacity for at least a six-hour flight, thus giving them a cruising radius of three hundred miles. That is, they will be able to raid many German ports and cities and return with ease to their base in England. Their small size—they are only thirty feet across the wings—and great speed will make them almost impossible to hit and it is expected that antiaircraft guns will be practically useless against them. They will constantly circle in the higher levels, as near the Zeppelin bases as they can get, and the minute they see the giants emerging from their hangars they will be off to England to give the alarm. Their speed being double that of a Zeppelin, they will have reached England long before the raider arrives. Then the new “Canada” type, each carrying a ton of bombs, will go out to meet the Germans. These giant biplanes, one hundred and two feet across the wings, with two motors developing three hundred and twenty horse-power, have a speed of more than ninety miles an hour and can overtake a Zeppelin as a motor-cycle policeman can overhaul a limousine. They are fitted with the new device for insuring accuracy in bomb-dropping and, with their superior speed, will hang above the monster dirigibles, as a hawk hangs above a hen-roost, plumping shell after shell into the great silk sausage quivering below them.

Both the French and British Governments now have a considerable number of hydroaeroplanes in commission. These amphibious craft, which are driven by two motors of one hundred and sixty horse-power each and have a speed of about seventy-five miles an hour, are designed primarily for the hunting of submarines. Though a submarine cannot be seen from the deck of a vessel, an aviator can see it, even though it is submerged twenty feet, and a bomb dropped near it will cave its sides in by the mere force of the explosion, particularly if that bomb is loaded with two hundred pounds of melinite, as are the ones carried by the French hydroaeroplanes.

But the most novel of all the uses to which the aircraft have been put in this war is that of dropping spies in the enemy’s territory. On numerous occasions French and British aviators have flown across the German lines, carrying with them an intelligence officer disguised as a peasant or a farm-hand, and have landed him at some remote spot where the descent of an aeroplane is scarcely likely to attract the attention of the military authorities. As soon as the aviator has landed his passenger he ascends again, with the understanding, however, that he will return to the same spot a day, or two days, or a week later, to pick up the spy and carry him back to the French lines. The exploits of some of these secret agents thus dropped from the sky upon enemy soil would make the wildest fiction seem probable and tame. One French officer, thus landed behind the German front in Flanders, succeeded in slowly working his way right across Belgium, gathering information as he went as to the resources of the Germans and the disposition of their troops, only to be caught just as he was crossing the frontier into Holland. Though the Germans expressed unbounded admiration for his coolness, courage, and daring, he was none the less a spy. He died before the rifles of a firing-party.

It has repeatedly been said that in this war the spirit of chivalry does not exist, and, so far as the land forces are concerned, this is largely true. But chivalry still exists among the fighters of the air. If, for example, a French aviator is forced to descend in the German lines, either because his machine has been damaged by gun fire or from engine trouble, a German aviator will fly over the French lines, often amid a storm of shrapnel, and drop a little cloth bag which contains a note recording the name of the missing man, or if not his name the number of his machine, whether he survived, and if so whether he is wounded. Attached to the “message bag” are long pennants of colored cloth, which flutter out and attract the attention of the men in the neighborhood, who run out and pick up the bag when it lands. It is at once taken to the nearest officer, who opens it and telephones the message it contains to aviation headquarters, so that it not infrequently happens that the fate of a flier is known to his comrades within a few hours after he has set out from the aviation field. Perhaps the prettiest exhibition of chivalry which the war has produced was evoked by the death of the famous French aviator, Adolphe Pegoud, who was killed by a German aviator whom he attacked during a reconnoissance near Petite Croix, in Alsace. The next day a German aeroplane, flying at a great height, appeared over Chavannes, an Alsatian village on the old frontier, where Pegoud was buried, and dropped a wreath which bore the inscription: “To Pegoud, who died like a hero, from his adversary.”

VII THE RED BADGE OF MERCY

Corporal Emile Dupont, having finished a most unappetizing and unsatisfying breakfast, consisting of a cup of lukewarm chicory and a half-loaf of soggy bread, emerged on all fours from the hole in the ground which for many months had been his home and, standing upright in the trench, lighted a cigarette. At that instant something came screaming out of nowhere to burst, in a cloud of acrid smoke and a shower of steel splinters, directly over the trench in which Emile was standing. Immediately the sky seemed to fall upon Emile and crush him. When he returned to consciousness a few seconds later he found himself crumpled up in an angle of the trench like an empty kit-bag that has been hurled into a corner of a room. He felt curiously weak and nauseated; he ached in every bone in his body; his head throbbed and pounded until he thought that the top of his skull was coming off. Still, he was alive, and that was something. He fumbled for the cigarette that he had been lighting, but there was a curious sensation of numbness in his right hand. He did not seem to be able to move it. Very slowly, very painfully he turned his head so that his eyes travelled out along his blue-sleeved arm until they reached the point where his hand ought to be. But the hand wasn’t there. It had quite disappeared. His wrist lay in a pool of something crimson and warm and sticky which widened rapidly as he looked at it. His hand was gone, there was no doubting that. Still, it didn’t interest him greatly; in fact, it might have been some other man’s hand for all he cared. His head throbbed like the devil and he was very, very tired. Rather dimly he heard voices and, as through a haze, saw figures bending over him. He felt some one tugging at the little first-aid packet which every soldier carries in the breast of his tunic, he felt something being tied very tightly around his arm above the elbow, and finally he had a vague recollection of being dragged into a dug-out, where he lay for hours while the shell-storm raged and howled outside. Along toward nightfall, when the bombardment had died down, two soldiers, wearing on their arms white _brassards_ with red crosses, lifted him onto a stretcher and carried him between interminable walls of brown earth to another and a larger dug-out which he recognized as a _poste de secours_. After an hour of waiting, because there were other wounded men who had to be attended to first, the stretcher on which Emile lay was lifted onto a table over which hung a lantern. A bearded man, wearing the cap of a medical officer, and with a white apron up to his neck, briskly unwound the bandages which hid the place where Emile’s right hand should have been. “It’ll have to be taken off a bit further up, _mon brave_,” said the surgeon, in much the same tone that a tailor would use in discussing the shortening of a coat. “You seem to be in pretty fair shape, though, so we’ll just give you a new dressing, and send you along to the field ambulance, where they have more facilities for amputating than we have here.” Despite the pain, which had now become agonizing, Emile watched with a sort of detached admiration the neatness and despatch with which the surgeon wound the white bandages around the wound. It reminded him of a British soldier putting on his puttees. “Just a moment, my friend,” said the surgeon, when the dressing was completed, “we’ll give you a jab of this before you go, to frighten away the tetanus,” and in the muscles of his shoulder Emile felt the prick of a hypodermic needle. An orderly tied to a button of his coat a pink tag on which something—he could not see what—had been scrawled by the surgeon, and two _brancardiers_ lifted the stretcher and carried him out into the darkness. From the swaying of the stretcher and the muffled imprecations of the bearers, he gathered that he was being taken across the ploughed field which separated the trenches from the highway where the ambulances were waiting. “This cleans ’em up for to-night,” said one of the bearers, as he slipped the handles of the stretcher into the grooved supports of the ambulance and pushed it smoothly home. “Thank God for that,” said the ambulance driver, as he viciously cranked his car. “I thought I was going to be kept here all night. It’s time we cleared out anyway. The Boches spotted me with a rocket they sent up a while back, and they’ve been dropping shells a little too close to be pleasant. Well, s’long. When I get this bunch delivered I’m going to turn in and get a night’s sleep.”

The road, being paved with cobblestones, was not as smooth as it should have been for wounded men. Emile, who had been awakened to full consciousness by the night air and by a drink of brandy one of the orderlies at the _poste de secours_ had given him, felt something warm and sticky falling ... drip ... drip ... drip ... upon his face. In the dim light he was at first unable to discover where it came from. Then he saw. It was dripping through the brown canvas of the stretcher that hung above him. He tried to call to the ambulance driver, but his voice was lost in the noise of the machine. The field-hospital was only three miles back of the trench in which he had been wounded, but by the time he arrived there, what with the jolting and the pain and the terrible thirst which comes from loss of blood and that ghastly drip ... drip ... drip in his face, Emile was in a state of both mental and physical collapse. They took him into a large tent, dimly lighted by lanterns which showed him many other stretchers with silent or groaning forms, all ticketed like himself, lying upon them. After considerable delay a young officer came around with a note-book and looked at the tag they had tied on him at the dressing-station. On it was scrawled the word “urgent.” That admonition didn’t prevent Emile’s having to wait two hours before he was taken into a tent so brilliantly illuminated by an arc-lamp that the glare hurt his eyes. When they laid him on a narrow white table so that the light fell full upon him he felt as though he were on the stage of a theatre and the spot-light had been turned upon him. An orderly with a sharp knife deftly slashed away the sleeve of Emile’s coat, leaving the arm bare to the shoulder, while another orderly clapped over his mouth and nose a sort of funnel.