CHAPTER X—CORPORAL DON
Not long after this there came another very interesting day in Don Hale’s life. He had graduated from the first and second classes and was to make his first flight in the air.
Only those who have gone through a similar experience can understand Don Hale’s feelings when he seated himself in the cockpit of a much-used though sturdy little plane and laid hold of the controls. No veteran airman or famous “ace”[[7]] could possibly have felt more exultant or proud.
The school by this time had become very full, and many of the élèves were obliged to await their turn; so there were always plenty of spectators on the field; and these generally paid particular attention to the boys who were making their first trial spin in the air. This all added to Don Hale’s tremendous desire to make a good showing; for he still had vivid recollections of his preliminary experiences with the “penguins.”
“Now, remember, make no attempt to turn in the air,” commanded the moniteur in charge. “Perfectly straight flights only; fly no higher than thirty feet above the ground.”
“Get out your tape-measure, Donny,” giggled Roy Mittengale. “Remember, every foot adds to the jolt of the fall at the bottom.”
“Don’t try to imitate Lieutenant Thaw so much that you’ll hurt yourself,” advised Ben Holt.
“Safety first in airplanes means not to go up at all,” chimed in another.
Don, however, wasn’t paying the slightest attention to these jocular remarks, for the mechanic had his hand on the propeller.
It certainly was a wonderful sensation to the young airman when he felt the machine suddenly begin to move, slowly at first, but rapidly gathering momentum, until, like a high power motor car, it was racing at a speed which made him almost gasp for breath.
Presently the boy gritted his teeth together, and, with a peculiar feeling suggestive of I-wonder-what-is-going-to-happen-next state of mind, pulled back gently on the control stick.
And then, abruptly, he realized that the monoplane was traveling ahead with a most wonderful smoothness. The wind rushed past, lashing and stinging his face with its terrific force, but the heavy goggles prevented his eyes from being affected.
Don Hale glanced over the side of the cockpit, and, a little to his dismay, discovered that he was just skimming a few feet above the surface of the earth.
A quick pull on the control stick sent the monoplane racing aloft, and before the boy, trembling with excitement, could bring it to an even keel he was far above the height limit set by the instructor.
At first Don Hale had been acutely nervous—even fearful and apprehensive. To him it was a very marvelous thing to be actually off the earth, the pilot of a real flying machine. And it scarcely seemed possible that the machine should require so little attention. Like a flash, all the unpleasant feelings that had disturbed him vanished.
Jubilant, exultant, almost ready to shout with the sheer joy of the exhilarating sensations he was experiencing, Don Hale once more looked earthward. How strange the ground looked flying beneath him at incredible speed! How high above it he appeared to be! If anything should happen to his machine a fall from that height might produce most serious results.
With one swift, comprehensive glance, his eyes took in the boys at various points on the field and the planes which, for one reason or another, were resting here and there on the turf. Then his greatest desire and ambition in the world was to descend—to return to that haven of safety.
Yes, flying was easy enough; but when it came to making a landing—that was where the difficulty began.
Nervously, Don switched off the current and pushed the control stick forward.
And, to his utter dismay, the plane seemed to be falling headlong at an acute angle—the ground to be fairly shooting up toward him.
For one brief instant he had a terrible vision of a fatal smash-up. Then, a pull of the lever in the opposite direction brought the nose of the machine upward again. And following this, to the boy’s intense surprise and relief, the monoplane dropped in the most gentle fashion to terra firma, taxi-ing across the field, its speed rapidly diminishing.
When it had come to a stop Don found his face bathed in perspiration and his pulse throbbing in a way that it had seldom done before.
“By George! Am I actually here!” he muttered.
Notwithstanding the fact that the boy had made a mighty good landing and could hear shouts of approval coming from the distance he was too honest with himself to be gratified with the achievement. He knew that it was simply a case of good luck.
“But just wait till next time!” he muttered, grimly. “By George, the earth never seemed so fine before!”
A number of Annamites presently appeared and turned the machine around.
It was not for some time, however, that Don’s nerves quieted down sufficiently for him to put his airplane into motion. With a fervent hope that fate would be as kind to him as it had been before, he switched on the ignition and once again faced the blasts of wind.
Then came the delicious moment of soaring upward—the ecstasy of feeling himself borne through the air as swiftly as the arrow from an archer’s bow and that sense of wonderful freedom which the airman alone can enjoy.
As before, he glanced downward, and a humorous thought came into his mind.
“Certainly I’m the biggest thirty feet that was ever known above the ground,” he murmured. “I hope I don’t fly to the moon.”
With astonishing rapidity the distant hangars, from hazy, indistinct objects, became strong and clear. He could see the students and instructors, watching, it seemed to him, with an interest and close attention that fired his spirit with the keenest determination to make a landing that would surprise them.
He did.
But the machine was not badly wrecked, nor was he himself injured by the fall of fifteen feet.
It was merely a case, Mittengale genially explained, in which the earth happened to be that many feet lower than it should have been.
Don said very little. It rather jarred his sensibilities to hear the mirthful laughter and bantering remarks and to see the Annamites towing an extraordinarily wobbling machine toward the repair shop. And, besides this, to add to his disturbed state of mind, the moniteur, a boyish chap named Boulanger, very loudly called attention to the error which had caused the accident, between times roundly scolding him.
“Quite a neat little bawling out!” chirped Dublin Dan, soothingly. “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.”
“I don’t include that word in my vocabulary,” exclaimed Don, with a half smile.
But though Don Hale’s start in the third class had not been particularly auspicious, nevertheless, by the end of the day he managed to gain sufficient mastery over the plane to receive a “Pas mal, Hale!”—“Not bad!” from the same moniteur who had chided him.
That evening, while lying in his bunk, he summed up the situation in regard to himself. There were other pupils who had made faster progress, but the boy felt sure that what he had learned he had thoroughly learned. He knew, however, that there was a tremendous amount of work ahead of him before he could possibly hope to equal the skill of the most humble flyer of the Lafayette Squadron—a squadron which he devoutly hoped to join.
Difficulties have the effect on some natures of spurring them to greater zeal and determination; so it was in the case of Don Hale. Each failure, each “bawling out,” each chorus of laughter only acted as a stimulus.
In a little less than a week he had acquired sufficient skill in driving the machine in straight courses across the field to be promoted another step—that is to the tour de piste, or tour of the aviation field at a height of about three hundred feet.
This was, of course, designed to teach the airmen how to make their turns in the air, an operation requiring the greatest accuracy and care. Up to this time Don thought he had enjoyed about all the thrills that it was possible to have, but the first tour de piste undeceived him. All the other experiences faded into insignificance when compared to this. In his splendid isolation from all mankind, he was filled with a certain sense of awe a little unnerving at first. He was in a situation where no power save his own could be of any avail, and on the first two or three occasions involuntary tremors shook his frame as the Bleriot monoplane banked, or swung around at an angle.
Happily, however, there was no tragedy to record. With increasing confidence, Don dared to rise higher, and within a few hours had reached the required altitude. From this elevation he viewed with absorbed attention the wonderful panorama, which, like a colored map, was outspread before him, revealing fields of various forms, shapes and colors, and patches of woods and hills. And dividing the landscape were light lines—the roads—running in all directions.
His first tour was satisfactory to himself and his instructors. The turns held no terror for him.
Following this several days of bad weather put a stop to the work of the school. During the enforced inactivity Bobby Dunlap had his curiosity and interest in Victor Gilbert and Jason Hamlin still further heightened by a violent altercation between the two, although neither he nor any one else was near enough to overhear the conversation. The fact, too, that the young chaps had evidently been just on the point of indulging in a physical encounter made the “Gilbert-Hamlin affair,” as Bobby termed it, decidedly interesting.
“I’m going to find out all about it some day,” he laughed, nodding his head emphatically.
“Bully boy!” chuckled Sid Marlow.
When the period of dull weather was over Don Hale started in with greater zeal than ever. He was doing his best to equal the record of T. Singleton Albert, who had so far recovered his nerve that he had no hesitancy at all in executing the vrille.
By gradual degrees, Don took his machine to greater altitudes, until, at length, he was making the tour de piste at a height of three thousand five hundred feet. Now feeling somewhat like a veteran, he was fully prepared when the order came for him to perform some of the simpler evolutions in the air. One of these consisted in spiraling down to the earth with the engine shut off and landing almost directly beneath the point at which he started. Another was to volplane swiftly downward, and then, while still several hundred feet in the air, bring the machine to a horizontal position and swing around either to the right or left.
These exercises proved to be a pretty severe test on his nerves, and at first affected his head and stomach in a truly distressing manner; but constant practice, combined with a determined will, finally enabled him to gain the mastery over them, and he began keenly to enjoy the great and thrilling swoops through space.
At length there came a time to which he had been looking forward most anxiously, and that was the beginning of his training in a big Caudron biplane, a rather slow but safe machine. This meant that Don Hale’s stay at the École Militaire de Beaumont was nearly at an end.
There were now but two tests before him, one known as the petit voyage and the other the grande voyage. The first was a sixty mile trip and return; the second a triangular journey, each side being about seventy miles in length.
By the time Don had passed these successfully T. Singleton Albert and Victor Gilbert had gone to the great finishing school located at Pau, in the southern part of France.
It was indeed a happy moment to Don when he received his “Brevet d’Aviateur Militaire” from the War Department, which made him a corporal in the French army. This merely meant, however, that he had graduated from the school at Beaumont, and, like the two who had preceded him, was sent to take a course in “acrobatics” at Pau.
Pau, he found, was very delightfully situated, and within sight of the snow-capped Pyrenees.
With even added zest, Don Hale entered into the work before him. It was more dangerous than anything he had attempted in the school at Beaumont; but the tactics he learned were of extreme importance, being precisely those used in air fighting on the front.
About the middle of his course Don Hale was ordered to report to the Mitrailleuse school at Casso, on the shore of a lake, where soldiers in all branches of the army are trained in the use of machine guns. In a two-seater, piloted by another airman, Don Hale practiced firing at captive balloons and moving targets on the lake.
At first it proved very difficult, but constant work soon enabled him to meet the requirements of his instructors.
After the completion of this training he returned to Pau for a short period. Following this he went to Plessis Belleville to add a few final touches before being assigned to combat duty in one of the escadrilles.
The boy’s greatest ambition was to join the Lafayette, where he might be near his chum George Glenn, and he passed through a period of much anxiety before the matter was finally settled in the affirmative by the military authorities.
Proud and happy indeed, in his neatly-fitting uniform, with the corporal’s stripes on his sleeve and the golden wings and star insignia on his collar, Don Hale set out on his journey to join the escadrille, then encamped not far from Bar-le-Duc, near the Verdun front.
| [7] | Ace—a pilot who has brought down five or more enemy planes. |