An hour and a half. Just time for the cyclist to buzz down to the nearest town for some extra hors d'œuvres, salad, and half a dozen old bottles. In the end everything runs off smoothly, and when the white wine succeeds the red, the usual explication des coups begins—highly entertaining inside stuff, from which one could cull a whole backstairs history of French aviation. It has been my privilege to meet many famous men in this way—great "aces" and great administrators of the flying arm; men whose names are known wherever European aviators gather. I wish I could tell you half the drolleries they recount, or reproduce one quarter of the precise, ironical, story-telling manner of a cultivated Frenchman.
A captain who lunched with us to-day, bearer of an historic name, was recently decorated (somewhat against his will) for forcing a Boche to land in our lines. The truth is that in the single combat high above the lines, the captain's motor failed and he coasted for home, maneuvering wildly to escape the pursuing Hun's bullets. A few kilometres within our lines the German motor failed also, and down they came together—the Boche a prisoner, the Frenchman covered with not particularly welcome glory. Not all our guests knew the story, and one high officer asked the captain how he maneuvered to drive down the Boche. "Oh, like this," erratically said the captain, illustrating with frantic motions of an imaginary stick and rudder.
"But the Boche—?" inquired the other, puzzled, "how did you get him down—where was he?"
"Ah, the Boche; he was behind me," answered the captain.
Another officer, recently promoted to a very high position in the aviation, is a genuine character, a "numero" as they say here. He recently spent many hours in perfecting a trick optical sight, guaranteed to down a Boche at any range, angle, or speed. He adored his invention, which, he admitted, would probably end the war when fully perfected, and grew quite testy when his friends told him the thing was far too complicated for anything but laboratory use. At last, though he had reached a non-flying rank and had not flown for months, he installed the optical wonder on a single-seater and went out over the lines to try it out. As luck would have it, he fell in with a patrol of eight Albatrosses, and the fight that followed has become legendary. Boche after Boche dove on him, riddling his plane with bullets, while the inventor, in a scientific ecstasy, peered this way and that through his sight, adjusting set-screws and making hasty mental notes. By a miracle he was not brought down, and in the end a French patrol came to his rescue. He had not fired a shot! At lunch the other day some one asked what sort of a chap this inventor was, and the answer was so exceedingly French that I will reproduce it word for word: "He detests women and dogs; he has a wife he adores, and a dog he can't let out of his sight." A priceless characterization, I think, of a testy yet amiable old martinet.
One of my friends here had the luck, several months ago, to force a Zeppelin to land. A strange and wonderful experience, he says, circling for an hour and a half about the huge air-monster, which seemed to be having trouble with its gas. He poured bullets into it until his supply was exhausted, and headed it off every time it tried to make for the German lines. All the while it was settling, almost insensibly, and finally the Hun crew began to throw things out—machine-guns, long belts of cartridges, provisions, furniture, a motley collection. In the end it landed intact in our lines—a great catch. The size of the thing is simply incredible. This one was at least ninety feet through, and I hesitate to say how many hundred feet long.
Three more of our boys gone, one of them my most particular pal. Strange as it seems, I am one of the oldest members of the squadron left. We buried Harry yesterday. He was the finest type of young French officer—an aviator since 1913; volunteer at the outbreak of war; taken prisoner, badly wounded; fourteen months in a German fortress; escaped, killing three guards, across Germany in the dead of winter, sick and with an unhealed wound; back on the front, after ten days with his family, although he need never have been a combatant again. A charming, cultivated, witty companion, one of the most finished pilots in France, and a soldier whose only thought was of duty, his loss is a heavy one for his friends, his family, and his country. For a day and a night he lay in state in the church of a near-by village, buried in flowers sent by half the squadrons of France; at his feet his tunic ablaze with crosses and orders. It was my turn to stand guard the morning his family arrived, and I was touched by the charming simple piety of the countryfolk, who came in an unending stream to kneel and say a prayer for the soul of the departed soldier. Old women with baskets of bread and cheese on their arms brought pathetic little bouquets; tiny girls of seven or eight came in solemnly alone, dropped a flower on Harry's coffin, and knelt to pray on their little bare knees. The French peasants get something from their church that most of us at home seem to miss.
At last the family came—worn out with the long sad journey from their château in middle France. Harry's mother, slender, aristocratic, and courageous, had lost her other son a short time before, and I was nearer tears at her magnificent self-control than if she had surrendered to her grief. Her bearing throughout the long mass and at the grave-side was one of the finest and saddest things I have ever seen in my life. Poor old Harry—I hope he is in a paradise reserved for heroes—for he was one in the truest sense of the word.