"After all," he said, "they showed a little judgment. They did not arrest Navarre until he had run down three gendarmes."
Although many men in the army have longer lists of fallen Germans to their credit, no Frenchman has ever flown with the grace and skill of Navarre. The great Guynemer was only a fair flier and owed his success to his skill as a gunner. But Navarre was master of all the tricks. Upon one occasion he bet a companion that he could make a landing on an army blanket. The blanket was duly fastened in the middle of the field and away flew the aviator. His preliminary calculation was just a bit off and at the last minute he nosed sharply down and wrecked the machine. But he hit the blanket and won the bet.
Next to Germany, America has done most to take romance out of the air, so the Frenchmen say. The American air student attends lectures and learns about meteorology and physics. He learns how to take a motor apart and put it together again. In fact, he is versed in all the theory of flying long before he is allowed to venture in the air. Of course this is the best system. It would be the system of any nation which had the opportunity of taking its time, yet the scholarly approach cannot fail to dim adventure a little bit. Launcelot would have been a somewhat less dashing knight if he had begun his training in chivalry by learning the minimum number of foot pounds necessary to unhorse an opponent or the relative resilience of chain mail and armor. Yet not all the training in the world can take the stunt spirit out of the young American aviator. One who shipped as a passenger with a Frenchman bound for a bombing raid, paid for his passage by crawling out along the fuselage of the machine to release a bomb which had stuck. But it was a little incident back of the lines which gave me the best insight into the character of the American aviator. I know a young aviator of twenty-five who is already a major and the commander of a squadron. He wasn't particularly old for his years, either. I remember he told us with great glee how he and another young aviation officer had nailed the purser in his cabin one night during the trip across. Yet he could be stern upon occasion. He was walking along the field one day when he saw a plane looping. He was surprised because the French instructor attached to the squadron had told them that the type of machine which they were using would not do the loop the loop. It didn't have sufficient power, he said, nor would it stand the strain.
"It made five loops," said the major in telling the story, "and they were dandies, too, as good as I ever saw. I thought it was the Frenchman, of course, but I asked somebody and he said, 'No, it's Harry.' When he came down I bawled him out. 'You were told not to do that, weren't you?' I asked him. He said, 'Yes, sir.' 'Well, what did you do it for?' I asked him. 'I guess it was because the Frenchman told me it was impossible,' he said. I told him that he would have to turn his machine over to another man and that other disciplinary measures would be applied. He's in disgrace still and I suppose I've got to keep it up for a while. That's all right, good discipline and all that sort of thing, you know, but there's one thing I can't take away from him, and nobody else can. He's the only man in France that ever looped that type of machine. He did it. By golly, I envy him, but I don't dare let him know it."
CHAPTER XIII
HOSPITALS AND ENGINEERS
SOME of the compliments the mannerly French poured out upon the army left the Americans feeling that they didn't quite deserve them. Others they could take standing. Well to the front of the second lot were all the good words for the medical corps. A leading writer for a big Parisian afternoon paper took the first three columns of his first page to say with undisguised emotion that the French government not merely could, with profit, but should and must pattern after the American Army Medical Service.
One good army hospital in France is like another and so let it be the New York Post Graduate unit which was picked at random for the purpose of a visit. We straggled off the train with two old peasant women whose absorbed faces under their peaked white caps did not encourage us to ask our way of them, and one poilu, bent under the astonishing miscellany of the home-going French soldier. He lost his chance to escape us by eyeing us with frank if friendly curiosity. Could he direct us to the American Army Hospital, we asked, and he wrinkled his weather worn nose. No, he hadn't been home since the Americans had come to war, but, of course, there was only one building in town big enough and new enough to be used by the Americans. If we should turn to the left and then to the right and then to the left again we would come to the school and there he thought we would find the Americans. We did. To the far end of the little town we trudged till we came to a low stone building, gray and white, of good stout masonry. We knew it was the American hospital because over the arched entrance there hung a "bannière etoilée."
We neared the entrance to the tune of some trumpet blasts, not very well played, and we peered from arch to inner court yard just in time to see a swarm of khaki-half-clad soldiers running out from barracks. By the time they reached the mess door they were khaki-clad. The officer who came to take us about explained that on Sunday mornings everybody slept late and dressed on the way to breakfast and that discipline was better on week days. Then he told us that of all the privates in that unit not one had ever been a soldier before. They had been picked for medical service first and military service at such time as the officers had learned enough to teach it to them. I remember later that one of the soldiers objected privately to being drilled by a dentist.
Nine-tenths of the men were fresh out of college, the officer told us, and half the other tenth were freshmen or sophomores. Many of the enlisted men, we were told, had left incomes in the tens of thousands and a few in the hundreds of thousands. The enlisted personnel included one matinee idol, one young New York dramatic critic, two middling well known young authors, a composer of good but saleable music, and a golfer who gets two in the national rating.
The wards were not very different from those of a New York hospital back home, except that they housed a strange mixture of patients. About half were American soldiers and the rest were civilians from the country round about. The French civilians were convinced that though the American doctors might cure them with their marvelous medicines and speckless cleanliness they would surely kill them with air. This particular base hospital was fulfilling two functions for the civilian population. It was seeking to take out adenoids and let in air. A great New York specialist was attending to the adenoids and making progress. It was not always possible to convince the patient that it would do him any good to have his adenoids removed, but if the operation gave the kind American doctor any pleasure he was willing to let him go ahead. The air campaign was making slower progress. Dislike of air is centuries old in France and it has become an instinct with the race. I rode in a railroad car with a French aviator on a balmy day of early autumn and his first act upon entering the compartment was to close both windows. Everybody in this part of France has his bed placed inside a closet and at night he closes the doors.