“Vat?” alertly answered Paegelow, thinking the lad had spied something.
“It’s pitch dark up here, I can’t see a damn thing and it’s raining to beat Hell up here,” spoke the observer.
“Iss dot up dare all de trouble you got?” said Paegelow, indicating his overruling of the demurrer.
“Well, what are you going to do about it?” demanded the exasperated Lieutenant.
Paegelow hesitated a second, then replied, “Vell, vill you shut up and go on and vork. It iss pitch dark down here, und I can’t see a damn ting down here either, und it iss raining to beat ’ell down here too.”
When we started to work with new Infantry and Artillery units some were pleased and others did not want to have anything to do with us. It was at Château-Thierry that such lack of liaison became a serious matter and at the same time was the basis for several amusing incidents. The line units were prone to blame the Air Service for everything that went wrong. The reason was that they considered an airplane so experimental and uncertain in itself that that fact alone would preclude any argument as to the proper placing of blame for every failure.
One of the hardest things we had to contend with was impressing upon the line units the fact that the Corps Observation and the Corps Air Service Commander had absolutely nothing to do with the Pursuit and Attack planes; that all these came directly under the French Army Commander.
Several times I answered the telephone to receive the scathing denunciation that “the Hun was over shooting up some of our Posts of Command and that none of our d—d airplanes had been seen in the air all day.” Whereupon we tried to explain that we did not control the pursuit planes; that it should have been reported to the Army Headquarters and that we, of course, would report it immediately. The ground units considered this rather poor tactics and a very unsatisfactory answer, for to their minds all planes were offensive fighters. Had the line units realized the actual number of planes we had on the front and the area they were patrolling they might have realized why our planes were not seen oftener. We did not have them to be seen.
One of the greatest difficulties we had was in teaching the doughboy to recognize the American insignia. Our publications were responsible for this, for every magazine published in the United States pictured the American airplane with a big star painted on its wings, while the insignia actually adopted was a cocarde—three circles of red, white and blue, within one another, the center circle being white, the British center circle being red, and the French center circle being blue. As a matter of fact, the star in the air, at a reasonably long distance, looks exactly like the German Maltese Cross. In fact, a French airman once remarked that if the American had gone into combat with that much advertised star and the Germans failed to get him, a friendly airman, misjudging the star for a cross, certainly would have given a real battle.
Our doughboys actually thought that the American insignia was a huge star, for all the magazines had firmly implanted that on their minds. They didn’t care about the insignia of any other nation outside of the American and German. To them one was a star and the other a cross, anything else was either friendly or enemy; and they would take a chance on it being enemy and fire at it.