The Navy eternal

by Bartimeus

Here it might be mentioned that the machines were hurtling through space at a speed in the region of one hundred miles an hour. The pilot of the “H.A.,” having swooped to within speaking distance, pushed up his goggles and laughed triumphantly as he took his sight for the shot that was to end the fight. But the observer had his own idea of how the fight should end.

“Then shot one tray into pilot’s face,” he says, with curt relish, and watched him stall, sideslip, and go spinning earthward in a trail of smoke.

He turned his attention to his own pilot. The British machine was barely under control, but as the observer rose in his seat to investigate, the foremost gun fired, and the aggressor ahead went out of control and dived nose-first in helpless spirals. Suspecting that his mate was badly wounded in spite of this achievement, the observer swung one leg over the side of the fuselage and climbed on to the wing—figure for a minute the air pressure on his body during this gymnastic feat—until he was beside the pilot. Faint and drenched with blood, the latter had nevertheless got his machine back into complete control.

“Get back, you ass,” he said, through white lips, in response to inquiries as to how he felt. The ass got back the way he came, and looked round for the remainder of the “H.A.’s.” These, however, appeared to have lost stomach for further fighting, and fled. The riddled machine returned home at one hundred knots, while the observer, having nothing better to do, continued to take photographs. “The pilot, though wounded, made a perfect landing.” Thus the report concludes.

The Navy-that-Flies had been in France some time before the Army heard very much about its doings. This was not so much the fault of the Army as the outcome of the taciturn silence in which the Navy-that-Flies set to work. It had been bidden to observe the traditions of the silent Navy, and it observed them, forbearing even to publish the number of Boche machines it accounted for day by day.

But there came a time when its light could no longer be hid under a bushel. “Hullo,” said the generals and others concerned with the affairs of the entrenched Army, speaking among themselves, “what about it?” They consulted the Army-that-Flies.

Now the Army-that-Flies had been confronted in the early days of the war with perhaps the toughest proposition that was ever faced by mortals of even their imperturbable courage. In numerical inferiority to the enemy it had been called upon to maintain a ceaseless photographic reconnaissance far behind the enemy’s trenches; to spot for the guns of the Army along a suddenly extended front: to “keep the wind up” the Boche so that for every ten of our machines that crossed the German lines, barely one of his would dare to cross ours. This is called aerial supremacy, and they established and maintained it with fewer and worse machines than they care to talk about to-day.

“Of course we know all about these naval Johnnies,” said the Army-that-Flies. “They’d steal grey paint from their dying grandmothers, and they fear nothing in the heavens above, nor the earth beneath, nor in the waters under the earth. They are complaining that things are getting a bit dull along the coast.... We might show them a thing or two if they cared to join up with us for a while.”

“Let’s ask them,” said the Army.

So the Navy-that-Flies was invited “to co-operate with the Royal Flying Corps on such portions of the line where its experience of escort work and offensive patrols would prove of the greatest value.” Or words to that effect.