Two more shells dropped within a hundred yards of us before we got that tire pumped up and departed. Even so, I believe the world's record for pumping up tires was broken on this occasion. I am in position to speak with authority on this detail, because I was doing the pumping.
CHAPTER IX. ACES UP!
INSIDE the German lines at the start of the war I met Ingold, then the first ace of the German aërial outfit; only the Germans did not call them aces in those days of the beginnings of things. The party to which I was attached spent the better part of a day as guests of Herr Hauptmann Ingold and his mates. Later we heard of his death in action aloft.
Coming over for this present excursion I crossed on the same steamer with Bishop of Canada—a major of His Britannic Majesty's forces at twenty-two, and at twenty-three the bearer of the Victoria Cross and of every other honour almost that King George bestows for valour and distinguished service, which means dangerous service. I have forgotten how many boche machines this young man had, to date, accounted for. Whether the number was forty-seven or fifty-seven I am not sure. I doubt if Bishop himself knew the exact figure.
At Paris, after my arrival, and at various places along the Front I have swapped talk and smoking tobacco with sundry more or less well-known members of the Lafayette Escadrille and with unattached aviators of repute and proved ability. From each of these men and from all of them—Belgians, Italians, Americans, Britishers and Frenchmen—I brought away an impression of the light-hearted gallantry, the modesty and the exceeding great competency which appear to be the outstanding characteristics of those who do their fighting—and, in a great many instances, their dying—in the air. It was almost as though the souls of these men had been made cleaner and as though their spirits had been made to burn with a whiter flame by reason of the purer element in which they carried on the bulk of their appointed share in this war business. You somehow felt that when they left the earth they shook off from their feet a good part of the dirt of the earth. I do not mean to imply that they had become superhuman, but that they had acquired, along with their training for a special and particularised calling, some touch of the romanticism that attached to the ancient and dutiful profession of knight-errantry.
Nor is this hard to understand. For a fact the flying men are to-day the knights-errant of the armies. To them are destined opportunities for individual achievement and for individual initiative and very often for individual sacrifice such as are denied the masses of performers in this war, which in so many respects is a clandestine war and which in nearly all respects is an anonymous war. I think sometimes that, more even than the abject stupidity of the enterprise, it is the entire taking-away of the drama—the colour of theatricalism, the pomp and the circumstance, the fuss and the feathers—that will make war an exceedingly unpopular institution for future generations, as it has been an exceedingly unprofitable if a highly necessary one for this present generation. When the planet has been purged of militarism, the parent sin of the whole sinful and monstrous thing, I am convinced that the sordid, physically filthy drabness that now envelops the machinery of it will be as potent an agency as the spreading of the doctrine of democracy in curing civilised mankind of any desire to make war for war's sake rather than for freedom and justice.
One has only to see it at first hand in this fourth year of conflict to realise how completely war has been translated out of its former elements. It is no longer an exciting outdoor sport for fox-chasing gentlemen in bright-red coats; no longer a seasonal diversion for crosscountry riders in buckskin breeches. It is a trade for expert accountants, for civil-engineering sharps, for rule of thumb, for pick and shovel and the land surveyor's instruments. As the outward romance of it has vanished away, in the same proportion the amount of manual labour necessary to accomplish any desired object has increased until it is nearly all work and mighty little play—a combination which makes Jack a dull boy and makes war a far duller game than it used to be. Of course the chances for heroic achievements, for the development and the exercise of the traits of courage and steadfastness and disciplined energy, are as frequent as ever they were, but generally speaking the picturesqueness with which mankind always has loved to invest its more heroic virtues has been obliterated—flattened under the steam roller.
To the average soldier is denied the prospect of ever meeting face to face the foe with whom he contends. For every man who with set jaw climbs the top to sink his teeth, figuratively or actually, in the embodied enemy, there are a dozen who toil and moil far back behind in manual labours of the most exacting and exhausting forms imaginable. A night raid is a variety of sublimated burglary, better adapted to the temperament of the prowler and the poacher than to the upstanding soldier man's instincts. If there be fear of gas he adds to the verisimilitude of the imitation by hiding his face behind a mask as though he were a footpad. If a battle be a massacre, which generally it is, then intermittent fighting is merely organised and systematised assassination.