The A.E.F.: With General Pershing and the American Forces Part 8

When we got home after our trips to the artillery camps we found an old man in a French uniform eagerly waiting to see us. He told us that he was an American, and more than that, a Californian. His name was George La Messneger and he was sixty-seven years old. He was French by birth and had fought in the Franco-Prussian war, but the next year he went to California and lived in Los Angeles until the outbreak of the great war.

Although more than sixty, La Messneger was accepted by a French recruiting officer and he was in Verdun two weeks after he arrived in France. Three days later he was wounded and when we met him he had added to his adventures by winning a promotion to sous-lieutenant and gaining the croix de guerre and the medaille militaire.

Old George came to be a frequent visitor, but though we urged him on he would never tell us much about the war. He wanted to talk about California.

"I tell the men in my regiment," George would begin, "that out in Los Angeles we cut alfalfa five times a year, but they won't believe me."

Gently we tried to lead George back to the war and his experiences. "How did you get the military medal, lieutenant?" somebody asked.

"Oh, that was at Verdun," replied the old man.

"It must have been pretty hot up there," said another correspondent.

"Yes," said George, and he began to muse. We imagined that he was thinking of those hot days in February when all the guns, big and little, were turned loose.

"Yes," said George, "it was pretty hot," and we drew our chairs closer.

"You know," continued the old man, "a lot of people will tell you that Los Angeles is hot. Don't pay any attention to them. I've lived there forty years, and I've slept with a blanket pretty much all the time. The nights are always cool."

I had heard George before and I knew that he was gone for the evening now. As I tiptoed out of the room the old soldier in French horizon blue was just warming up to his favorite topic. "San Francisco's nothing,"

said George, dismissing the city with as much scorn as if it had been Berlin or Munich. He talked with such vehemence that all his medals rattled.

"We're nearer the Panama Ca.n.a.l," said George, "we're nearer China and j.a.pan, and as for harbors----"

But just then the door closed.

CHAPTER XII

OUR AVIATORS AND A FEW OTHERS

At first the ace is low. Our young aviators who will be among the most romantic heroes of them all begin humbly on the ground. The American army now has the largest flying field in France for its very own, but during summer and early autumn many of our men trained in the French schools. There his groundling days try the aviator's dignity. He must hop before he can fly and perhaps "hop" is too dignified a word. When we visited one of the biggest schools, all the new pupils were practicing in a ridiculous clipped wing Bleriot called a penguin. This machine was a groundhog which scurried over the earth at a speed of twenty or thirty miles an hour. It never left the gra.s.s tops and yet it provided a certain amount of excitement for its pilot, or maybe rider would be better.

The favorite trick of the penguin is to turn suddenly in a short half circle and collapse on its side. It takes a good deal of skill to keep it straight and when the aviator has learned that much he is allowed to make a trip in a machine which leaps a little in the air every now and then, only to flop to earth again. Then he is ready to fly a Bleriot, though, of course, his first trips are made as a pa.s.senger. Very little time is spent in flying. Staying up in the air is no great trick. It's the coming down which gives the trouble. And so the student is eternally trying landings. He smashes a good many machines and here the French show their keen realization of the mental factor in flying.

"I made a bad landing one day," an American student named Billy Parker told me, "and smashed my machine up good and proper. I thought I'd killed myself, but they dragged me out from under the junk, picked the pieces of wood and aluminum out of my head, stuffed some cotton into my nose to check the bleeding and in fifteen minutes they had a new machine out and had me up in the air again."

Parker said he felt a bit queer when he got up in the air again. "I had a sort of feeling that I belonged down on the ground and not up there,"

he said. "That was peculiar because usually the air feels very stable and friendly. You hate to come down, but this time I was anxious to get back and after circling the field once I came down. My landing was all right, too, and since then I've never had that scared feeling about the air."

The French theory is that the mistake must be corrected immediately. The man who has had a smash-up is apt to get air shy if he has a chance to brood over his mishap for a day or two.

The last test of the preliminary school is a thirty mile flight with three landings. After he has done that the student goes to Pau for his test in acrobatics. The chief stunt set for him here is a vrille. The student is required to put his machine into a spin at a height of about 8500 feet and bring it out again. The trick is not particularly difficult if the man keeps his head, but the tendency is to turn on the power which only accelerates the fall and some are killed at Pau. My friend caught malaria as soon as he got there and was allowed to take things easily for a week. Finally his test was set for Wednesday. On Monday morning the man who slept in the cot to his left went out for his test and was killed and on Tuesday the man from the right hand cot was killed. Death came very close to the young American. He and a French student arrived at the training ground at about the same time. Two machines were ready. The instructor hesitated a second and then a.s.signed the American to the machine at the right. A few minutes later the Frenchman was killed when a wing came off his machine as soon as he began his vrille. Fortunately Parker did not know that until after he had pa.s.sed his own test. He saw one other man killed before he left Pau and that horrified him more than the accident on the morning of his trial.

"The judge who decided whether you pa.s.sed your test was a little Frenchman with a monocle," he said. "He sat in a rocking chair at the edge of the field and you had to do the vrille straight in front of him or it didn't count. He simply wouldn't turn to look at a flyer. I was standing beside him when one fellow got rattled in the middle of a vrille and put his power on. Even at that he almost lifted his machine out but she came down too fast for him. There was a big smash-up and people came running out to the wreck. They sent for a doctor and then for a priest, but the terrible little man never moved from his chair.

'You see,' he cried to me, 'he was stupid! stupid!' This flying test had come to seem nothing more than an examination bluebook to him. A fellow pa.s.sed or he flunked and that was all there was to it."

Luck plays its biggest part in a flier's early days at the front. He has a lot to learn after he gets there, but the French do not nurse him along much. He has to take his chances. It may be that he will get in some very tight place before he has learned the fine points and a future star will be lost at the outset of his career. On the other hand he may come up against German fliers as green as himself and gradually gain a technique before he is called upon to face an enemy ace or a superior combination of planes. At the front as in the schools the French pay keen attention to the mental state of the fliers.

"There was always champagne at mess and they kept the graphophone playing all through dinner any night a man from our squadron didn't come back," an aviator said to me. "One afternoon we lost two men and before dinner they took a leaf out of the table. Our commander didn't want us to notice any empty seats or the extra s.p.a.ce."

It is difficult to say which nation has the most daring aviators, but that honor probably belongs to the English. I asked a Frenchman about it and he said: "The English do most of the things you would call stunts.

There was one, for instance, that made a landing on a German aviation field and after firing a few rounds at the aerodrome flew away again.

That was a stunt. But we think the English are fools with their sportsmans.h.i.+p and all that. It doesn't work now. We look at it a little differently. We cannot take fool chances. If you take a fool chance you are very likely to get killed. That is not nice, of course. We do not like to be killed, but more than that, it is one less man for France. We must wait until there is a fair show."

"And when is that?" I asked.

"When there are not more than four Germans against you," said the careful Frenchman.

The warlike spirit of the French aviators extended even to the servants at the preliminary school which we visited. The Americans there were all quartered in one big room and their general man of all work was a little Annamite from French-Indo-China. Hy seemed the most peaceful member of a peace-loving race as he moved about the barracks just before dawn every morning waking up the students with a smiling "Bon jour" and an equally good-natured "Cafe." One day he had a holiday and after borrowing a uniform he went to a photographer's in the nearest town. From the photographer he borrowed a rifle, a cutla.s.s and a pistol. He thrust the cutla.s.s into his belt and shouldered the other two weapons. After he had a.s.sumed a fighting face the picture was taken.

The next day Hy varied the routine. He began with "Bon jour" as usual, but before he said "Cafe" he drew from behind his back the photograph, and pointing to it proudly, exclaimed, "brave soldat."

We went from the French school to the big field where the American camp was under construction. The bulk of the work was being done by German prisoners. One of these, a sergeant, had been a well known architect in Munich. The American workers consulted him now and then in regard to some building problem and he always gave them good advice. He took almost a professional pride in the growing buildings even if they were designed to house the men who will one day be the eyes of the American army. We asked another prisoner how he got along with the Americans and he replied: "Oh, some of them aren't half bad." A third spoke to us in meager broken English, although he said that he had lived five years in Buffalo. "Are you going back to Germany after the war?" we asked him.

"Nein," he replied decisively, "Chicago."

Most prisoners professed to be confident that Germany would win the war and they all based their faith on the submarine. As we started to go the man from Buffalo suddenly held out his hand and said: "So long." Several of the correspondents shook hands with him much to the horror of a young American in the French flying corps who accompanied us.

"You mustn't do that," he explained. "Any Frenchman who saw you do that would be very much shocked."

I remembered then that when I saw German prisoners in any of the large towns the French inhabitants took great pains to ignore them. I never heard French people jeer at their prisoners. Their att.i.tude was one of complete aloofness. Once I saw prisoners in a big railroad station and the crowds swept by on either side without a glance as if these men from Prussia had been so many trunks or trucks or benches.

If the young Americans at the school had not been so busy learning the business of flying they could have formed a cracker jack nine or eight or eleven, as the squad included some of the most famous of our college athletes.

We also visited an English aerodrome which was not far from our headquarters. This was a camp from which planes started for raids into Germany. The men who were carrying on this work were all youngsters. I saw no one who seemed to be more than twenty-five. Just the day before we arrived the Germans had discovered their whereabouts and had raided the hangars. One man had been killed and two planes wrecked. Machine gun bullets had left holes in all the buildings about the place. The English officer smiled when we looked about. "Oh, yes," he said, "the Hun was over last night and gave us a bit of a bounce." His slang was fluent but puzzling. He was explaining why he and his fellow aviators flew at a certain height on raids. "You see," he said, "the Hun can't get his hate up as far as that."

The bombing machines of the squadron were huge, powerful planes, but they all had pet names painted upon them such as "Bessie" and "Baby" and "Winifred" which had been twice to Stuttgart. These English fliers were a quiet, reticent crowd who became fearfully embarra.s.sed if anybody tried to draw them out on the subject of their exploits. One of them went over to an American Red Cross hospital nearby a few days after our visit and played bridge with three American doctors there. He had been a rather frequent visitor and a keen and eager player, so they were somewhat surprised when he told them at nine o'clock that he would have to go. He was three francs behind and started to fumble around in his pockets to find the change. "Oh, never mind," said one of the doctors.

"Some other night will do. You'll be over here again pretty soon, I hope."

"Oh, no," said the young Englishman, "I'd rather pay up now. Sorry to toddle off so early. Beastly nuisance, you know, but I've got to go over and bomb Metz to-night."

Much more would be heard of the flying exploits of the English if their individual reticence were not combined with a governmental policy of not announcing the names of the fliers who bring down enemy planes.

Unfortunately, the American army seems prepared to follow this example.

One of the high officers in the American air service in France said that he did not intend to treat aviators like prima donnas. He added that he thought it was a big mistake to advertise aces. However, the Germans play up their star airmen in the newspapers and on the moving picture screen and it must be admitted that they have not made many mistakes from a purely military point of view.

Inevitably, however, the status of the flier is changing. n.o.body regrets this more than the aviators of France. The French army used to have a saying, "all aviators are a little crazy," and n.o.body believed it so thoroughly as the aviators. They took great pride in being unlike other people in a war which was all cramped up into schedule. An aviator got up when he felt like it and flew when the mood was on. If he felt depressed, or unlucky, or out of sorts, he rolled over and went to sleep again. n.o.body said anything about it. When he fought the battle was a duel with an opponent who was also a knight and sportsman although a Boche.

But there was no keeping efficiency out of the air. The German brought it there. He discovered that two planes were better than one and three even better. He introduced teamwork and the lone French errants of the air began to be picked off by groups of Germans who would send one machine after another diving down on a single foe. The Flying Circus and other aerial teams of the Germans have not only driven chivalry from the air, but they have taken a good deal of the joy out of flying. Very reluctantly the French have adopted squadron flying and the airman now finds himself obeying commands just as if he were an infantryman or an artillerist. Even the civilian population has begun to show that it realized the change in the status of the aviator. There was, for instance, poor Navarre, the finest flier in the army, who was sent to prison because he came to Paris on a spree and ran down three gendarmes with his racing auto. French aviators cannot see the sense of punis.h.i.+ng Navarre. I only heard one aviator who had any excuse to offer for the civilian authorities.

"After all," he said, "they showed a little judgment. They did not arrest Navarre until he had run down three gendarmes."

Although many men in the army have longer lists of fallen Germans to their credit, no Frenchman has ever flown with the grace and skill of Navarre. The great Guynemer was only a fair flier and owed his success to his skill as a gunner. But Navarre was master of all the tricks. Upon one occasion he bet a companion that he could make a landing on an army blanket. The blanket was duly fastened in the middle of the field and away flew the aviator. His preliminary calculation was just a bit off and at the last minute he nosed sharply down and wrecked the machine.

But he hit the blanket and won the bet.

Next to Germany, America has done most to take romance out of the air, so the Frenchmen say. The American air student attends lectures and learns about meteorology and physics. He learns how to take a motor apart and put it together again. In fact, he is versed in all the theory of flying long before he is allowed to venture in the air. Of course this is the best system. It would be the system of any nation which had the opportunity of taking its time, yet the scholarly approach cannot fail to dim adventure a little bit. Launcelot would have been a somewhat less das.h.i.+ng knight if he had begun his training in chivalry by learning the minimum number of foot pounds necessary to unhorse an opponent or the relative resilience of chain mail and armor. Yet not all the training in the world can take the stunt spirit out of the young American aviator. One who s.h.i.+pped as a pa.s.senger with a Frenchman bound for a bombing raid, paid for his pa.s.sage by crawling out along the fuselage of the machine to release a bomb which had stuck. But it was a little incident back of the lines which gave me the best insight into the character of the American aviator. I know a young aviator of twenty-five who is already a major and the commander of a squadron. He wasn't particularly old for his years, either. I remember he told us with great glee how he and another young aviation officer had nailed the purser in his cabin one night during the trip across. Yet he could be stern upon occasion. He was walking along the field one day when he saw a plane looping. He was surprised because the French instructor attached to the squadron had told them that the type of machine which they were using would not do the loop the loop. It didn't have sufficient power, he said, nor would it stand the strain.

"It made five loops," said the major in telling the story, "and they were dandies, too, as good as I ever saw. I thought it was the Frenchman, of course, but I asked somebody and he said, 'No, it's Harry.' When he came down I bawled him out. 'You were told not to do that, weren't you?' I asked him. He said, 'Yes, sir.' 'Well, what did you do it for?' I asked him. 'I guess it was because the Frenchman told me it was impossible,' he said. I told him that he would have to turn his machine over to another man and that other disciplinary measures would be applied. He's in disgrace still and I suppose I've got to keep it up for a while. That's all right, good discipline and all that sort of thing, you know, but there's one thing I can't take away from him, and n.o.body else can. He's the only man in France that ever looped that type of machine. He did it. By golly, I envy him, but I don't dare let him know it."