XV
THE AIRMAN
IF D'Artagnan were alive in France today he would not be in the Chasseurs, gallant and dashing as they are. Neither would he be in the Foreign Legion, that terrible body of men who give no quarter nor take any, and who have dwindled from some sixty thousand to less than eight thousand; who set out at each attack to collect some particular souvenir from the enemy—now it is helmets, now bayonets, now buttons; the last time it was officers' field glasses, a very good type of souvenir, indeed.
Nor would D'Artagnan have stood behind that aristocratic little gun, the seventy-five, the thoroughbred of the artillery. Athos, Porthos and the rest, they might have been zouaves. Chasseurs a pied, light field artillerymen, bombers or bayonet pliers, but not D'Artagnan. If he were alive to-day he would undoubtedly be an airman. He could be nothing else and nothing less.
The airman is the adventurer, the explorer, the nonpareil of the modern army. When he is in Paris on leave, in London at the theater, in Milan at the Arcade, everybody turns around to observe him. When you mention that So-and-So is in aviation, other soldiers say:
"Ah, that is the service! If only my eyes if my heart"
There is a spell about the airman. The mystery of a new element and the mastery of it is woven around him. When you see him strolling along in the aristocratic way he cannot help but have with his perfect nerves, his perfect respiration, his perfect heart and his 100 per cent of eye-sight, hearing, touch and all the senses, he seems to tread the earth only with the tips of winged feet, like Mercury. Of course D'Artagnan, if alive, would be a flier.
To tell the truth, I believe that he is alive. I believe I saw him, not once nor twice. I saw him in command of the great first flying school of France, where all the airmen of that nation go for their elementary training. I watched him out of the corner of my eye as he walked beside me to the great stalls where the racers of the air are kept and groomed.
I noted the wound stripes on his arm, the quick gestures with which he tapped his boots with his swagger stick; I watched his bright black eyes darting from side to side over his beaklike nose—I have seen a number of airmen with noses like hawks. And more than once I thought of those lithe little fellows who used to be so famous in Kentucky, because they took their lives in their hands every time they put on colors and mounted the bony racers, and I remembered one, also, that I had seen years ago as he lay in the dust of the track, his bones broken, his head thrown back, his eyes closed.
I saw D'Artagnan, too, not far behind the lines of Verdun. He was commandant of the artillery observers' section, and he looked like a hundred-yard man at Yale—except that he was probably 26—and wore two little black streaks, one on each side of his upper lip.
I saw him, too, in England, doing the fluttering leaf dive, his plane falling helpless, circling and winding, hundreds of feet down, only to right itself and climb again, doing leap after leap, flying upside down for minutes on end. I heard him tell calmly that seven men had lost their lives learning to fly at this field last week, two this week so far, five the week before last.
I talked with him, too, in a London hotel, just back from the front, where his machine had been repeatedly riddled, the back of his seat carried away by a shell, and when I asked him what advice he would give to a young airman, for his care of himself, he replied:
"Tell him not to try any tricks under a thousand feet from the ground, and he will be quite all right."
Another bit of advice from an old flier to a new one is: "Never fly out of your turn. If there is a call to fill some other fellow's time, let the next man in order take it." Nor is this advice based solely upon superstition.
There is good psychology back of it, for he explained: "If you are out of your turn you no more than get up into the air than you begin to say to yourself: This is not my turn, now I wonder if I am going to get it, when I should not?' and in spite of yourself you will become obsessed by the thought and lose coolness and efficiency. You may become reckless and desperate."
I saw the same gallant, adventurous spirit of D'Artagnan in Italy in the young marquis who made the record flight to London a few days later. I stood with him beside the wonderful car in which he was to make the trial, and looked her over. He touched her reverently with his hand and looked into my eyes and smiled, for this was the only way we could converse.
I met, also, the dauntless young Italian captain who had made the altitude record of over 23,000 feet, a week or two ago, with an observer. He had reached 25,000 feet alone before that; but of course it could not be of record.
Then if ever I saw D'Artagnan in the flesh, it was at dinner in Milan, with Signor Caproni, "Engineer" Caproni, they all call him, the leading inventor in aviation in Italy whose name is a household word. Caproni had just told me the story of this Roman young captain, at the end of the table; how he had been the first to bomb Pola, the Austrian submarine base on the Adriatic; how the government had said it was impossible to bomb Pola, and the commands were that no airman should attempt to reach Pola; how this Roman captain had violated the commands, had gone off one night all alone, had done the thing that bureaucracy had said was impossible; and how the Austrian communique next day had borne witness to the feat.
"The result?" I asked.
The result was two months' imprisonment for the captain and his removal from aviation to the cavalry, which has little or nothing to do.
The captain knew that Signor Caproni was telling me the story, for he glanced over once and smiled. Then, being unable to tell him what I thought of him, and his achievement, and bureaucracy in all countries and ages, I just lifted my glass to him and pledged him.
After all, I think I told him; for he soon remarked to a neighbor, and the remark was translated for me, that the only way to win a war was to have no government behind it. He was different from other airmen; he was heavier about the jaw, thicker in the neck and nose, and sternly determined in the mouth.
I delighted in hearing him talk, for his voice was deep, strong, coarse, but soft and low. Perhaps you believe that a contradiction, but you should have heard the voice. I could imagine him in a purple bordered tunic and gold laced sandals on the Via Sacra, or in greaves and plumed helmet on the plains of Philippi.
At the same table that night sat a young fair-haired lieutenant—there are many fair-haired and blue-eyed Italians—who had been over Pola many times since the impossible became possible, and he smiled at our colloquy. I observed that his eyes were very bloodshot, and I knew it was not from drink. Italians are abstemious.
Perhaps, however, the most adventurous spirit at that board was the engineer himself, Caproni. Not merely during this war, but for the last eight or nine years has this young dreamer been flying and building fliers. Since his country went to war with the central powers, he has cherished a plan for killing the war, which he has dinned into the ears of officialdom, until at last they are beginning to listen. At first his friends said:
"Caproni, you are a fool, a dreamer. You are a professorial sort of being."
To-day they have come his way, and he cannot work fast enough to help the allied governments carry out his plan. It is very simple, this plan, as he explained it to me:
"To win the war, we must have an overwhelming superiority in artillery and munitions. To accomplish that we must not merely increase our own stock, we must diminish the enemy's. If we can demolish his sources of supply, and interrupt his flow of guns and shells, even for a short time, a few weeks, we can break his lines.
"We know where his factories are, just as we know where his submarine bases are. How can we reach and disorganize them? With heavy planes in the air, carrying large supplies of bombs."
Certainly; plain as the beak on a birdman's face! That is the way the war will finish. D'Artagnan will do it in the air. It is a matter of mathematics.
War is an industry. The man who has the most planes will win the war. Everybody sees it now, and the governments, our own among them, are buying Caproni's big biplanes and triplanes, triple engined, 600-horsepower, capable of carrying three men and a ton or so of explosives and of coming home with one engine disabled or two engines disabled.
Furthermore, other nations are building the same sort of planes and adopting Caproni's idea. Italy cannot meet the demand for planes. She cannot get the raw materials, which she must import. The ships are not sailing fast enough for Italy. The world, however, is moving fast enough Caproni's way, and the patrician face of this young engineer of thirty-four or thirty-five wears the quiet smile of the man who has, with the aid of circumstances, conquered the stubbornness of governments; and his big, dark eyes look away absently, as if dreaming still more for the future.
Oh, yes, it can be done,"he said to me. And after the war, when we have time, it will be done. It will take about four stages to cross the Atlantic; the first from Milan to Portugal, the second to the Azores, the third to New Iceland, the fourth to New York. We are preparing for it now. The triplane will do it with mail and passengers."
At the time I thought I would look up "New Iceland." I supposed my geography was at fault. I think now it was his English. He could not have meant Iceland, nor Newfoundland. I think he was feeling for some name in the Bermudas. At all events, the four stages will be found, and the "nations' airy navies, grappling in the central blue," will give way to the "argosies of magic sails, pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales."
Neither need it be so expensive a mode of travel, nor take many years to develop. Before I die I expect to sail to Europe high over the waves of the Atlantic, where seasickness cannot corrupt, nor censorship officials break through and steal my notes and photographs, as they did the other day.
Italy began this war, as we have done, practically without knowledge of aviation. To-day she holds the Austrian airmen in the hollow of her hand, is making airships for us and for England, and is teaching some hundreds of our young Americans to fly. She has inventive genius.
I saw Marconi, one day, driving along the streets of Turin, looking very young and handsome in his naval uniform. Italy has also administrative genius to a degree that has astonished the world. She has made good in this war, and not least in aviation.
Among all these nations it is taken for granted that the young American boy who undertakes to fly will succeed. Quite a percentage of their own young men, it seems, could never learn, and they try to weed out these by rigid nerve tests and the like. But the sports and the outdoor life of the American lad, like those of the English, only to a greater degree, seem to fit him for flying.
In France they do not take an American through the slow degrees of patient training through which they take their own lads. They, in a way, toss him up into the air and let him try his wings. The English are inclined to do the same with their own boys, and one wonders if this is not the reason for so many casualties in British flying schools.
The French and the Italians are very careful in their training of new fliers; every school machine is fitted with two sets of controls, identical, and coupled; every move of the teacher is felt and imitated by the pupil through a long continued course. The commanders of these stations informed me that they very seldom have accidents.
The physical examinations, too, have eliminated many of the unfit and reduced casualties. The candidates are tested not only as to soundness of eyes, ears, heart, lungs, all the evident necessities, but also as to mental reactions, sense of location, nerve control.
For example, they are placed upon a revolving table, blindfolded, whirled around several times and asked to indicate the points of the compass. Water is poured in the ears to test the resistance of the drums. They stand barefoot on one leg and are told to hop backwards along a line.
They perform various other ludicrous stunts in a state of nudity. They consider that much of this is all poppycock; but if it saves the lives of a few lads here and there it is well worth while. To be sure, that ace of aces, Guynemer—the French call an airman an ace when he has brought down five of the enemy—could stand none of these tests.
He was physically unfit, according to all the rules. He was a consumptive, weighed less than a hundred pounds, and knew he could only live a year or two at best. He accounted for more than fifty Hun planes, just because he was a man in ten million and was selling the fag-end of his life as dearly as might be.
What a shudder went up over France—yes, over allied Europe the other day when he went down. I heard the news several days before it was printed, from our own airmen in Paris; but we could not believe it, so often had the rumor of the terrible little man's death gone out. His father and mother do not believe it yet, but are waiting for him in the little home in Compiegne, to which he used always to fly when he came back from the front, like a bird to his mountain.
Many other fathers and mothers there are who will wait and wait in vain. How much better, though, for Guynemer! He was the most real D'Artagnan of them all.
America is going into aviation in earnest. I could tell many things about orders placed by our government in foreign factories; about many square miles of territory acquired for fields and 'dromes; about the training places of many of our lads in allied lands; but these things are best left undiscussed.