With a dozen other flying men I landed in Boulogne on the seventh of March, 1917, for my second go at the war. At the Boulogne quay we separated, and I wish I could say that “some flew east and some flew west,” but as a matter of fact we didn’t fly at all. Instead, we meandered along over the slow French railroads for nearly two days before reaching our destinations.
One other pilot and myself had been ordered to join a flying squadron on the southern sector of the British line. The squadron to which we were assigned had a great reputation, one of the best in all France, and we were very proud to become members of it. Captain Albert Ball, who was resting in England at the time, but who came back to France in the late spring and was killed within a few weeks, had brought down twenty-nine machines as a member of “our” squadron. That was an inspiration in itself.
The first day of my stay with the squadron there was no flying and so I wandered about the field hangars looking at the machines. They were all of a type I had never seen before at close range Nieuport Scouts, very small and of course with but a single seat. Being a French model, the Nieuport Scout is a beautiful creature. The distinctly British machines—and some of our newer ones are indeed marvels of the air—are built strictly for business, with no particular attention paid to the beauty of lines. The French, however, never overlook such things.
The modern fighting scout, and to my mind the single-seater is the only real aeroplane for offensive work, may have the power of two-hundred horses throbbing in its wonderful engine. Some of the machines are very slender of waist and almost transparent of wing. Aeroplanes do not thrust their warlike nature upon the casual observer. One has to look twice before definitely locating the gun or guns attached so unobtrusively to the framework, and synchronised, where necessary, to shoot through the whirring propeller in front. Such guns are connected to the engine itself by means of cams and are so arranged that they can fire only when the propeller reaches a given position, thus allowing the bullets to pass safely between the blades. It seems like a very delicate bit of timing, but the devices are extremely simple.
The nacelle, or cockpit of the modern machine, I have heard people say, suggests to them the pilot house of a palatial private yacht in miniature. They generally are finished in hard wood and there are polished nickel instruments all about you. They indicate height, speed, angle, revolutions, and about everything an airman ought to know. There are ingenious sights for the guns and range-finders for bomb dropping. When he is tucked away in the nacelle, a little well-like compartment, about as big around as an ordinary barrel, only the pilot’s head is visible above the freeboard of the body of the machine—the body being technically known as the fuselage. Directly in front of the pilot is a cute little glass windscreen, a sort of half-moon effect.
We newcomers at the squadron—the other pilot and myself—had to stand by the next day and watch the patrols leaving to do their work over the lines. It was thrilling even to us, accustomed as we were to ordinary flying, to see the trim little fighters take the air, one after the other, circle above the aerodrome, and then dropping into a fixed formation, set their courses to the East. That night we listened with eager ears to the discussion of a fight in which a whole patrol had been engaged. We stay-at-homes had spent the day practice-flying in the new machines. There were three days more of this for me, and then, having passed some standard tests to show my familiarity with the Nieuport type, I was told the next morning I was to cross the lines for the first time as the master of my own machine.
The squadron commander had been killed the day before I arrived from England, and the new one arrived the day after. It rather pleased and in a sense comforted me to know that the new commander was also going over in a single-seater for the first time when I did. He had been flying up to this time a two-seater machine which calls for entirely different tactics during a fight. Two-seater machines as a rule have guns that can be turned about in different positions. On the fighting scouts they generally are rigidly fixed. This means that it is necessary to aim the machine at anything you wish to fire at.
The night before I was to “go over” I received my orders. I was to bring up the rear of a flight of six machines, and I assure you it was some task bringing up the rear of that formation. I had my hands full from the very start. It seemed to me my machine was slower than the rest, and as I wasn’t any too well acquainted with it, I had a great time trying to keep my proper place, and to keep the others from losing me. I was so busy at the task of keeping up that my impressions of outside things were rather vague. Every time the formation turned or did anything unexpected, it took me two or three minutes to get back in my proper place. But I got back every time as fast as I could. I felt safe when I was in the formation and scared when I was out of it, for I had been warned many times that it is a fatal mistake to get detached and become a straggler. And I had heard of the German “headhunters,” too. They are German machines that fly very high and avoid combat with anything like an equal number, but are quick to pounce down upon a straggler, or an Allied machine that has been damaged and is bravely struggling to get home. Fine sportsmanship, that!
The way I clung to my companions that day reminded me of some little child hanging to its mother’s skirts while crossing a crowded street. I remember I also felt as a child does when it is going up a dark pair of stairs, and is sure something is going to reach out of somewhere and grab it. I was so intent on the clinging part that I paid very little attention to anything else.
We climbed to a height of more than two miles on our side of the lines, then crossed them. There were other formations of machines in the air, patrolling at various places. I could see them in the distance, but for the life of me I could not tell whether they were friendly or hostile. On the chance that they might be the latter, I clung closer than ever to my comrades. Then, a long way off, I was conscious that a fight was going on between a patrol of our machines and a Hun formation. I could make little of it all until finally I saw what seemed like a dark ball of smoke falling and learned afterwards it was one of our own machines going down in flames, having been shot and set on fire by the enemy airmen.
A few minutes after this my attention was attracted elsewhere. Our old friends the “Archies” were after us. It is no snug billet, this being in the rear of a formation when the “Archies” are giving a show. They always seem to aim at the leading machine, but come closer to hitting the one at the end of the procession. The first shot I heard fired was a terrific “bang” close to my ears. I felt the tail of my machine suddenly shoot up into the air, and I fell about three hundred feet before I managed completely to recover control. That shot, strange to relate, was the closest I have ever had from anti-aircraft fire. The smoke from the exploding shell enveloped me. But close as it was, only one piece of the flying steel fragments hit my machine. Even that did no damage at all.
After recovering control I looked about hastily for the rest of my formation, and discovered that by now they were at least half a mile away, and somewhat higher than I was. Terrified at being left alone, I put my engine on full and by taking a short cut, managed to catch up with them. Much relieved, I fell in under the formation, feeling safe again, and not so alone in the world.
We continued to patrol our beat, and I was keeping my place so well I began to look about a bit. After one of these gazing spells, I was startled to discover that the three leading machines of our formation were missing. Apparently they had disappeared into nothingness. I looked around hastily, and then discovered them underneath me, diving rapidly. I didn’t know just what they were diving at, but I dived, too. Long before I got down to them, however, they had been in a short engagement half a mile below me, and had succeeded in frightening off an enemy artillery machine which had been doing wireless observation work. It was a large white German two-seater, and I learned after we landed that it was a well-known machine and was commonly called “the flying pig.” Our patrol leader had to put up with a lot of teasing that night because he had attacked the “pig.” It seems that it worked every day on this part of the front, was very old, had a very bad pilot, and a very poor observer to protect him.
It was a sort of point of honour in the squadron I that the decrepit old “pig” should not actually be I shot down. It was considered fair sport, however, to frighten it. Whenever our machines approached, the “pig” would begin a series of clumsy turns and ludicrous manoeuvres, and would open a frightened fire from ridiculously long ranges. The observer was a very bad shot and never succeeded in hitting any of our machines, so attacking this particular German was always regarded more as a joke than a serious part of warfare. The idea was only to frighten the “pig,” but our patrol leader had made such a determined dash at him the first day we went over, that he never appeared again. For months the patrol leader was chided for playing such a nasty trick upon a harmless old Hun.
During my dive after the three forward machines, I managed to lose them and the enemy machine as well. So I turned and went up again where I found two of my companions. We flew around looking for the others, but could not find them, so continued the patrol until our time was up and then returned to the aerodrome. The missing ones arrived about the same time and reported they had had a great many fights, but no decisive ones.
About this time the Germans were beginning in earnest their famous retreat from the country of the Somme. There had been days upon days of heavy fogs and flying had been impossible. A few machines went up from time to time, but could see nothing. The wily old Hun had counted upon these thick days to shield his well-laid plans, and made the most of them. Finally there came a strong breeze from the southwest that swept the fog away and cleared the ground of all mist and haze. This was on that wonderfully clear March day just before the Germans evacuated Bapaume and left it a mass of ruins. We were early in the air and had no sooner reached our proper height to cross the lines than we could see something extraordinary was happening behind the German trenches. From 15,000 feet we could see for miles and miles around. The ground was a beautiful green and brown, and slightly to the south we could see the shell-pitted battlefields of the Somme, each shell-hole with glistening water in it.
A few miles to the east there were long streaks of white smoke. Soon we realised that the Germans had set fire to scores of villages behind their front. From where we flew we could see between fifty and sixty of them ablaze. The long smoke plumes blowing away to the northeast made one of the most beautiful ground pictures I have ever seen from an aeroplane, but at the same time I was enraged beyond words. It had affected every pilot in the patrol the same way. We flew up and down over this burning country for two hours hunting, and wishing for German machines to come up and fight, but none appeared. We returned at last to the aerodrome and told what we had seen during our patrol, but news of the fires had long since been reported by the airmen whose duty it is to look out for such things, and our general staff had at once surmised the full import of what was happening.
The next week was full of exciting adventures. For days the clouds hung at very low altitudes, seldom being higher than 4,000 feet, and of course it was necessary for us to fly underneath them. At times during the famous retreat it was hard to tell just where the Germans were and where they were not. It was comparatively easy for the soldiers on the ground to keep in touch with the German rearguard by outpost fighting, but it was for us to keep tabs on the main bodies of troops. We would fly over a sector of country from east to west and mark down on our maps the points from which we were fired at. It was easy to know the Germans were at those particular points. This was very tense and exciting work, flying along very low and waiting each second to hear the rattle of machine guns or the crack of a shell. We were flaunting ourselves as much as possible over the German lines in order to draw their fire.