“Of course. It’s perfectly simple. I’ve done it at Gloucester.” He turned to General Evans. “Now, sir, you see why we’ve had no wireless reports from our captive balloon.”
This mention of the captive balloon brought to mind the peril of Payne Whitney, who was on lookout duty in the balloon near the German lines, and who might now be cut off by enemy aircraft, since he could not use his wireless to call for help. I can only state briefly that this danger was averted and Whitney’s life saved by the courage and prompt action of Robert J. Collier and Larry Waterbury, who flew through the night to the rescue of their friend with a supporting air squadron and arrived just in time to fight off a band of German raiders.
I deeply regret that I must record these thrilling happenings in such bald and inadequate words and especially that my pen is quite unequal to describing that strangest of battles which I witnessed the next day from the heights back of Remington. Never was there a more thrilling sight than the advance of this splendid body of American and South American aeroplanes, flying by squadrons in long V’s like flocks of huge birds, with a terrifying snarling of propellers. To right and left they manoeuvred, following wireless orders from headquarters that were executed by the various squadron commanders whose aeroplanes would break out bunting from time to time for particular signals.
So overwhelming was the force of American flyers, all armed with machine guns, that the Germans scarcely disputed the mastery of the air, and about seventy of their old-fashioned eagle type biplanes were soon destroyed. Our total losses here were only eleven machines, but these carried precious lives, some of our bravest and most skilful amateur airmen, Norman Cabot, Charles Jerome Edwards, Harold F. McCormick, James A. Blair, Jr., B. B. Lewis, Percy Pyne, 2nd, Eliot Cross, Roy D. Chapin, Logan A. Vilas and Bartlett Arkell.
I turned to my friend Hart O. Berg, the European aeroplane expert, and remarked that we seemed to be winning, but he said little, simply frowned through his binoculars.
“Don’t you think so?” I persisted.
“Wait!” he answered. “There’s something queer about this. Why should the Germans have such an inferior aircraft force? Where are all their wonderful Fokker machines?”
“You mean—”
“I mean that this battle isn’t over yet. Ah! Look! We’re getting our work in with that chlorine.”
It was indeed true. With the control of the skies assured us, our fleet of liquid gas carriers had now gone into action and at many points we saw the heavy poison clouds spreading over the enemy hosts like a yellow green sea. The battle of chlorine had begun. The war of chemistry was raining down out of the skies. It is certain that nothing like this had ever been seen before. There had been chlorine fighting in the trenches out of squirt gun apparatus—plenty of that in 1915, with a few score killed or injured, but here it came down by tons over a whole army, this devilish stuff one breath of which deep into the lungs smote a man down as if dead.