THE 100-POUND TERROR OF THE AIR
WHEN he registered at a New York hotel the clerk looked him over with a supercilious eye. He was a trifle undersized, to be sure, and youngish—twenty-two and weighing only one hundred pounds. And the name, W. A. Bishop, hastily scrawled on the register, meant nothing to the clerk—probably some college stripling in town to give Broadway the once-over. But a little later the same clerk looked at that name on the hotel roster with a sensation as nearly approaching awe as a New York hotel clerk is capable of feeling; for he had learned that the diminutive guest was the world-famous Maj. William Avery Bishop, of the British Royal Flying Corps, who in three months won every decoration Great Britain has created to pin upon the breasts of her gallant fighters.
Mars is a grim god and an exacting master, but he sometimes “smoothes his wrinkled front” at the blandishments of the little god of Love. And it was so in the case of Major Bishop when the gallant knight of the air checked the war-god in the hotel coat room and slipped away with Dan Cupid to Toronto, where his sweetheart was waiting to welcome him. They are to be married before he returns to the front.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reckons Bishop as the greatest air fighter since Guynemer. It says of his exploits:
So far as is known, Major Bishop is the only living man who has a right to wear not only the Military Medal but the Order of Distinguished Service, and not only that, but the Victoria Cross. Yet he is only twenty-two years old, and he blushed and stammered like a schoolboy when he tried to explain something about air fighting at a Canadian club dinner in New York. However, here is his record as piled up in five months at the front:
One hundred and ten single combats with German fliers.
Forty-seven Hun airplanes sent crashing to the earth.
Twenty-three other planes sent down, but under conditions which made it impossible to know certainly that they and their pilots had been destroyed.
Thrilling escapes without number, including one fall of 4,000 feet with his machine in flames.
The most daredevil feat of the war—an attack single-handed on a Boche airdrome, in which he destroyed three enemy machines.