"So that was it! Hardly felt it!" he said.
If the shell had exploded? Oh, well, that is a habit of shells; and in that case the pilot would be in the German lines unrecognizable among the débris of his machine after a "crasher."
Where in the old West gunmen used to put a notch on their revolver handle for every man killed, now in each aviator's record is the number of enemy planes which he has brought down. When a Frenchman has ten his name goes into the official bulletin. Everything contributes to urge on the fighting aviator to more and more victims till one day he, too, is a victim. Never were duels so detached or so intense. No clashing of steel, no flecks of blood, only two men with wings. While the soldier feels his weapon go home and the bomber sees his bomb in flight, the aviator watches for his opponent to drop forward in his seat as the first sign that he has lost control of his plane and of victory, and he does not hear the passing of the bullets that answer those from his own machine gun. One hero comes to take the place of another who has been lost. A smiling English youth was embarrassed when asked how he brought down the great Immelmann, most famous of German aviators.
Nelson's "Death or Westminster Abbey" has become paraphrased to "Death or the communiqué." At twenty-one, while a general of division is unknown except in the army an aviator's name may be the boast of a nation. In him is expressed the national imagination, the sense of hero-worship which people love to personify. The British aviation corps stuck to anonymity until the giving of a Victoria Cross one day revealed that Lieutenant Ball had brought down his twenty-sixth German plane.
Soon after the taking of Fort Douaumont when I was at Verdun, Beauchamp, blond, blue-eyed and gentle of manner, who had thrilled all France by bombing Essen, said, "Now they will expect me to go farther and do something greater;" and I was not surprised to learn a month later that he had been killed. Something in the way he spoke convinced me that he foresaw death and accepted it as a matter of course; and he realized, too, the penalty of being a hero. He had flown over Essen and dropped his bombs and seen them burst, which was all of his story.
The public thrill over such exploits is the greater because of their simplicity. An aviator has no experiences on the road; he cannot stop to talk to anyone. There is flight; there is a lever that releases a bomb; there is a machine gun. He may not indulge in psychology, which would be wool-gathering, when every faculty is objectively occupied. He is strangely helpless, a human being borne through space by a machine, and when he returns to the mess he really has little to tell except as it relates to mechanism and technique.
The Royal Flying Corps, which is the official name, never wants for volunteers. Ever the number of pilots is in excess of the number of machines. Young men with embroidered wings on their breasts, which prove that they have qualified, waited on factories to turn out wings for flying. Flight itself is simple, but the initiative equal to great deeds is another thing. Here you revert to an innate gift of the individual who, finding in danger the zest of a glorious, curiosity, the intoxication of action, clear eye, steady hand answering lightning quickness of thought, becomes the D'Artagnan of the air. There is no telling what boyish neophyte will show a steady hand in daring the supreme hazards with light heart, or what man whom his friends thought was born for aviation may lack the touch of genius.
Far up in the air there is an imaginary boundary line which lies over the battle line; and there is another which may be on your side or on the other side of the battle line. It is the location of the second line that tells who has the mastery of the air. A word of bare and impressive meaning this of mastery in war, which represents force without qualification; that the other man is down and you are up, the other fends and you thrust. More glorious than the swift rush of destroyer to a battleship that of the British planes whose bombs brought down six German sausage balloons in flames before the Grand Offensive began.
I need never have visited an aerodrome on the Somme to know whether Briton and Frenchman or German was master of the air. The answer was there whenever you looked in the heavens in the absence of iron crosses on the hovering or scudding or turning plane wings and the multiplicity of bull's-eyes; in the abandoned way that both British and French pickets flew over the enemy area, as if space were theirs and they dared any interference. If you saw a German plane appear you could count three or four Allied planes appearing from different directions to surround it. The German had to go or be caught in a cross fire, and manoeuvered to his death.
Mastery of the air is another essential of superiority for an offensive; one of the vital features in the organized whole of an attack. As you press men and guns forward enemy planes must not locate your movements. Your planes with fighting planes as interference must force a passage for your observers to spot the fall of shells on new targets, to assist in reporting the progress of charges and to play their proper auxiliary part in the complex system of army intelligence.