Most prisoners professed to be confident that Germany would win the war and they all based their faith on the submarine. As we started to go the man from Buffalo suddenly held out his hand and said: "So long." Several of the correspondents shook hands with him much to the horror of a young American in the French flying corps who accompanied us.
"You mustn't do that," he explained. "Any Frenchman who saw you do that would be very much shocked."
I remembered then that when I saw German prisoners in any of the large towns the French inhabitants took great pains to ignore them. I never heard French people jeer at their prisoners. Their attitude was one of complete aloofness. Once I saw prisoners in a big railroad station and the crowds swept by on either side without a glance as if these men from Prussia had been so many trunks or trucks or benches.
If the young Americans at the school had not been so busy learning the business of flying they could have formed a cracker jack nine or eight or eleven, as the squad included some of the most famous of our college athletes.
We also visited an English aerodrome which was not far from our headquarters. This was a camp from which planes started for raids into Germany. The men who were carrying on this work were all youngsters. I saw no one who seemed to be more than twenty-five. Just the day before we arrived the Germans had discovered their whereabouts and had raided the hangars. One man had been killed and two planes wrecked. Machine gun bullets had left holes in all the buildings about the place. The English officer smiled when we looked about. "Oh, yes," he said, "the Hun was over last night and gave us a bit of a bounce." His slang was fluent but puzzling. He was explaining why he and his fellow aviators flew at a certain height on raids. "You see," he said, "the Hun can't get his hate up as far as that."
The bombing machines of the squadron were huge, powerful planes, but they all had pet names painted upon them such as "Bessie" and "Baby" and "Winifred" which had been twice to Stuttgart. These English fliers were a quiet, reticent crowd who became fearfully embarrassed if anybody tried to draw them out on the subject of their exploits. One of them went over to an American Red Cross hospital nearby a few days after our visit and played bridge with three American doctors there. He had been a rather frequent visitor and a keen and eager player, so they were somewhat surprised when he told them at nine o'clock that he would have to go. He was three francs behind and started to fumble around in his pockets to find the change. "Oh, never mind," said one of the doctors. "Some other night will do. You'll be over here again pretty soon, I hope."
"Oh, no," said the young Englishman, "I'd rather pay up now. Sorry to toddle off so early. Beastly nuisance, you know, but I've got to go over and bomb Metz to-night."
Much more would be heard of the flying exploits of the English if their individual reticence were not combined with a governmental policy of not announcing the names of the fliers who bring down enemy planes. Unfortunately, the American army seems prepared to follow this example. One of the high officers in the American air service in France said that he did not intend to treat aviators like prima donnas. He added that he thought it was a big mistake to advertise aces. However, the Germans play up their star airmen in the newspapers and on the moving picture screen and it must be admitted that they have not made many mistakes from a purely military point of view.
Inevitably, however, the status of the flier is changing. Nobody regrets this more than the aviators of France. The French army used to have a saying, "all aviators are a little crazy," and nobody believed it so thoroughly as the aviators. They took great pride in being unlike other people in a war which was all cramped up into schedule. An aviator got up when he felt like it and flew when the mood was on. If he felt depressed, or unlucky, or out of sorts, he rolled over and went to sleep again. Nobody said anything about it. When he fought the battle was a duel with an opponent who was also a knight and sportsman although a Boche.
But there was no keeping efficiency out of the air. The German brought it there. He discovered that two planes were better than one and three even better. He introduced teamwork and the lone French errants of the air began to be picked off by groups of Germans who would send one machine after another diving down on a single foe. The Flying Circus and other aerial teams of the Germans have not only driven chivalry from the air, but they have taken a good deal of the joy out of flying. Very reluctantly the French have adopted squadron flying and the airman now finds himself obeying commands just as if he were an infantryman or an artillerist. Even the civilian population has begun to show that it realized the change in the status of the aviator. There was, for instance, poor Navarre, the finest flier in the army, who was sent to prison because he came to Paris on a spree and ran down three gendarmes with his racing auto. French aviators cannot see the sense of punishing Navarre. I only heard one aviator who had any excuse to offer for the civilian authorities.