Generally the escadrille is relieved by another fighting unit after two hours over the lines. We turn homeward, and soon the hangars of our field loom up in the distance. Sometimes I've been mighty glad to see them and not infrequently I've concluded the pleasantest part of flying is just after a good landing. Getting home after a sortie, we usually go into the rest tent, and talk over the morning's work. Then some of us lie down for a nap, while others play cards or read. After luncheon we go to the field again, and the man on guard gets his chance to eat. If the morning sortie has been an early one, we go up again about one o'clock in the afternoon. We are home again in two hours and after that two or three energetic pilots may make a third trip over the lines. The rest wait around ready to take the air if an enemy bombardment group ventures to visit our territory--as it has done more than once over Bar-le-Duc. False alarms are plentiful, and we spend many hours aloft squinting at an empty sky.
PRINCE'S AËRIAL FIREWORKS
Now and then one of us will get ambitious to do something on his own account. Not long ago Norman Prince became obsessed with the idea of bringing down a German "sausage," as observation balloons are called. He had a special device mounted on his Nieuport for setting fire to the aërial frankfurters. Thus equipped he resembled an advance agent for Payne's fireworks more than an aviateur de chasse. Having carefully mapped the enemy "sausages," he would sally forth in hot pursuit whenever one was signalled at a respectable height. Poor Norman had a terrible time of it! Sometimes the reported "sausages" were not there when he arrived, and sometimes there was a super-abundancy of German airplanes on guard.
He stuck to it, however, and finally his appetite for "sausage" was satisfied. He found one just where it ought to be, swooped down upon it, and let off his fireworks with all the gusto of an American boy on the Fourth of July. When he looked again, the balloon had vanished. Prince's performance isn't so easy as it sounds, by the way. If, after the long dive necessary to turn the trick successfully, his motor had failed to retake, he would have fallen into the hands of the Germans.
After dark, when flying is over for the day, we go down to the villa for dinner. Usually we have two or three French officers dining with us besides our own captain and lieutenant, and so the table talk is a mixture of French and English. It's seldom we discuss the war in general. Mostly the conversation revolves about our own sphere, for just as in the navy the sea is the favourite topic, and in the army the trenches, so with us it is aviation. Our knowledge about the military operations is scant. We haven't the remotest idea as to what has taken place on the battlefield--even though we've been flying over it during an attack--until we read the papers; and they don't tell us much.
Frequently pilots from other escadrilles will be our guests in passing through our sector, and through these visitations we keep in touch with the aërial news of the day, and with our friends along the front. Gradually we have come to know a great number of pilotes de chasse. We hear that so-&-so has been killed, that some one else has brought down a Boche and that still another is a prisoner.
We don't always talk aviation, however. In the course of dinner almost any subject may be touched upon, and with our cosmopolitan crowd one can readily imagine the scope of the conversation. A Burton Holmes lecture is weak and watery compared to the travel stories we listen to. Were O. Henry alive, he could find material for a hundred new yarns, and William James numerous pointers for another work on psychology, while De Quincey might multiply his dreams ad infinitum. Doubtless alienists as well as fiction writers would find us worth studying. In France there's a saying that to be an aviator one must be a bit "off."
After dinner the same scene invariably repeats itself, over the coffee in the "next room." At the big table several sportive souls start a poker game, while at a smaller one two sedate spirits wrap themselves in the intricacies of chess. Captain Thénault labours away at the messroom piano, or in lighter mood plays with Fram, his police dog. A phonograph grinds out the ancient query "Who Paid the Rent for Mrs. Rip Van Winkle?" or some other ragtime ditty. It is barely nine, however, when the movement in the direction of bed begins.
A few of us remain behind a little while, and the talk becomes more personal and more sincere. Only on such intimate occasions, I think, have I ever heard death discussed. Certainly we are not indifferent to it. Not many nights ago one of the pilots remarked in a tired way:
"Know what I want? Just six months of freedom to go where and do what I like. In that time I'd get everything I wanted out of life, and be perfectly willing to come back and be killed."