Dorman had failed.
Odd how a chap who lives so intensely for his first taste of actual war, who has run over it in theory a hundred times and more, odd how a chap that keen for service jams himself at the first opportunity.
Odd, too, that he should have at once been transferred back to Orly and made a ferryman, for there were scores up there; weary, tired men and men who simply had a bellyful of war—scores of them who would have welcomed such a change. But ferrying... gad, sirs, there was a job for you! Running tested ships up to the advanced airport and taking the crippled back to base. A job for an old man it was.
And yet here he was, Dorman, the big Texan who had come the four thousand miles from the Rio Grande to the Moselle to scrap the Huns—here he was riding the cockpit of a camber-splintered Nieuport 23 back to Orly while a hundred kilometers north...
Passing over Chaumont at five hundred meters he looked down on the great rectangular chateau that was Pershing’s headquarters; and he visualized himself putting the bus down nearby and marching smack into the General’s office and demanding action. He could almost see the surprise on Pershing’s face.
“General, sir,” he’d say; “I’m Lieutenant Dorman, late of Pursuit Group, one of the Ninety-Fourth. The first time in battle I funked and was sent back. Now I’d like to return.”
General Pershing would (or would he?) put on his professional visage and say: “How’d it happen, Lieutenant?”
Well, no matter what the General would say, or wouldn’t say, he’d get the story right there and then, truthfully, unembellished and with nothing overlooked. He might be offended, he might be amused and then there was a chance that he’d have some attaché throw the lieutenant out on an ear, but the story he would hear.
Two days (Dorman would begin) he’d been up when it happened. May nineteen was the date; dull, gray and misty. Atrocious flying weather but just the sort of weather you’d find around Toul in the early summer of ‘18. It looked like a day of no patrols, no work except for the alerts; a day when you could get together in the cubicles over several bottles and rub elbows with Campbell and Winslow and Lufbrey and listen to the masters. Oh, a green youngster could have done worse than draw this outfit!
But along about noon the mist blew itself on up towards St. Mihiel and the clouds lifted. The sky cleared and good visibility was restored. Dorman remembered Luf winking a shrewd eye at Campbell and saying: