Their “Archies” are shooting well, and they’ve got a lot more searchlights at work than they had last time. Rather warm work while it lasted. He thinks No. 1 was hit and brought down in flames. No. 2 seemed to have engine trouble this side of our lines on the way back. No. 3 ought to be along soon. And while he gulps his coffee and grunts monosyllables there is a whirring overhead and No. 3 returns, loudly demanding a fresh supply of bombs with which to put an artistic finish to a row of blazing oil-tanks.
They climb into their machines again and lean back resting, while the finishing touches (which sometimes come between life and death) are put to the machines and their deadly freight. Then once more they soar up into the night.
Dawn is breaking when No. 4 returns, tired-eyed, and more monosyllabic than ever. It came off all right, but No. 3 had seemed to lose control and slid down the beam of a searchlight with shells and balls of red fire (some new stunt, he supposed) bursting all about her. However, she got her bombs off first, and touched up something that sent a flame 200 feet into the air. He himself bombed a group of searchlights that were annoying him, and some trucks in a railway siding. The speaker has an ugly shrapnel wound in the thigh and observes with grave humour that his boots are full of blood—this is a Navy joke, by the way. Also that he could do with a drink.
But it came off all right.
Now the seaplanes, who undertake much the same sort of job, keep pigs, and contemplate their stern mission with an extinguishable and fathomless sense of humour. This may be accounted for by the fact that in life and death they are more in touch with the native element of the Navy-that-Floats and share much of its light-heartedness in consequence.
Aerial gymnastics are not in their line. They fight when they must, and the straightest shot wins. If hit, unless hopelessly out of control, they take to the water like a wounded duck. If the damage is beyond temporary repair they sit on the surface and pray for the dawn and a tow from a friendly destroyer.
No aerial adventure is ever recounted (and the array of medal ribbons round their mess table is witness to the quality of these blindfold flights) without its humorous aspect well-nigh obliterating all else. One who fought a Zeppelin single-handed with a Webley-Scott pistol and imprecations found himself immortalised only in the pages of a magazine of Puck-like humour they publish (Fate and funds permitting) monthly. Another, disabled on the water off an enemy’s port, succeeded in getting his engine going as the crew of an armed trawler were leaning over the bows with boat-hooks to secure him. He rose from the water beneath their outstretched hands, and recalled with breathless merriment nothing but the astonishment on their Teutonic faces. A third, similarly disabled, was approached on the surface by a German submarine. He raked her deck with his Lewis gun and kept her at bay—by the simple expedient of picking off every head that appeared above her conning-tower—until she wearied of the sport and withdrew. From a seaplane point of view it was a pretty jest.
At the conclusion of a day’s aerial fighting on the Somme front a certain officer of the Navy-that-Flies was asked how he felt about it.
“Wa-al ...” he drawled, and paused, groping in his mind for metaphor. “It’s jest like stealing candy from a kid.”
Making all allowances for poetic licence, this is a very fair illustration of the spirit in which the Navy-that-Flies went about the business. On the other hand there were a few who took a graver view of their responsibilities.