I was to be a lucky man in that there were few branches of the war in which I did not have experience until a German bomb laid me low at Baupaume. I not only got an opportunity to do my country service in the air as a military observer, though it sent me on my first trip to a hospital, but not so very long afterward had the wildest and possibly more thrilling experience in command of one of his Majesty’s ground “dreadnoughts”—the famous tanks.
Mind you, I wouldn’t paint myself as so brilliant and indispensable generally that the aviation corps was trying to steal me from the infantry and the special tank service from doing duty in the air.
But it is to be recalled that I was a trained soldier—that I had had ten years of study and practice of military affairs. I must credit myself with always having been ambitious. And so, when war came I had several strings to my bow that must surely prove of value. One of these was the acquirement of an expert knowledge of wireless telegraphy and telegraphy generally. I had also picked up a considerable knowledge of photography. And naturally I knew gunnery. There was a dearth of men in the British air service at the time competent for an observer’s duty, scarcely more than half enough to man the hundreds of aëroplanes that were being turned out under forced pressure. For the battle of the Somme was now under preparation and it was not only desirable but imperative that Britain’s aviators should take the mastery of the air. Scores of other young officers like myself possessing special qualifications for the work were requisitioned from the other branches of the army and put into intensive training as aviation observers.
The tragedies of Gallipoli and Belgium I had been through had not impaired me in any degree. Shell-shock had not shattered my nerves, physically I was in the best of shape and tests of my vision met all requirements.
You can wager though that I said several prayers during my practice flights. Once you got up in the air, however, there would come over you an amazing confidence in the trustworthiness of the fragile planes and the roaring motor.
The darts, loops, banks and volplaning that had at first turned me somewhat dizzy, I found myself getting used to. And there’s another thing about flying. It’s when you get ’way up. The further up you go, the less you think about falling. Or if you do the vastness of the upper regions simply takes all thoughts of self-importance out of a man. You are such a midget in the immensity after all. And you find yourself figuring, “Well, suppose I do drop? What a small thing I am anyway in this great world.” And it sets you thinking of the millions of men who have died in the great cause and to wondering why you should imagine you must of necessity be one of the lucky ones to escape. Flying would even take the “swank” out of the Kaiser or his booby-faced son.
For all that, however, there was one time in every flight when I held my breath—when I never quite got over being scared. That was the landing. The observation machine we had, while not so fast as some of the fighting flyers, was nevertheless capable of about one hundred miles an hour. When you are going at that pace, you swallow a lot of wind whenever you attempt to talk or rather shout. In machines of that speed, as the reader is probably informed, they begin to drop as soon as the pace goes under sixty miles an hour. That means you have to make your landing at a whooping, whizzing speed, and if you are forced to a landing away from your station and on rough ground, there will usually be bruises in the adventure for you at least. Lord bless me! But the earth would suddenly seem to be coming up at you fast—at express-train speed. Even the flyer will admit to you that it is the hardest, most nerve-racking feature of his nervous job. Just when you bring the wheels of the machine on a level with the ground there must be a swift upward turn—it is a ticklish proceeding, requiring “feel” as much as scientific knowledge of the levers, and if you don’t do the thing rightly, your plane will balk viciously, jabbing its nose into the ground, rearing, probably somersaulting, possibly smashing itself and you, too.
I soon came to have absolute confidence in my flyer, however. He was Lieut. Reggie Larkin and of my Gallipoli comrades, the Australians. He is now a youngster of not more than twenty years. But he had soon shown in training the peculiar faculties which are as much artistic and psychological as scientific, for the making of a fine flyer. He was always superbly confident of himself when he took to the air, a confidence that was contagious and of great aid to a novice like myself. And of his bravery I have a stirring account to give before this chapter closes.
As for me, after the first two or three training flights, I had not much time to think of myself. I had to make a showing in acquiring the use of the set, cinema camera with its purpose of acquiring continuous bird’s-eye views of the enemy’s positions and in mastering the use of aërial guns and the newer problems which they presented. This included the study of plaster models of landscapes with special reference to promontories the better to judge altitudes and for gun-aiming at what lay below your sweeping aëroplane.
Now I come to my most thrilling aërial adventure—my trip through hell in the clouds, a battle with a whirling Fokker, at that time Germany’s crack fighting plane, of gaining what we went out and up after and of the superb courage of Lieut. Reggie Larkin in guiding the machine through a tempest of attack though his face was ripped and bleeding because of shrapnel wounds.