Towards the Goal

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

With this true tale I have come back to a recollection of the words of the flying officer in charge of the aerodrome mentioned in my second letter, after he had described to me the incessant raiding and fighting of our airmen behind the enemy lines.

"Many of them don't come back. What then? They will have done their job."

The report which reaches the château on our last evening illustrates this casual remark. It shows that 89 machines were lost during February, 60 of them German. We claimed 41 of these, and 23 British machines were "missing" or "brought down."

But as I write the concluding words of this letter (May 3rd) a far more startling report—that for April—lies before me. "There has not been a month of such fighting since the war began, and the losses have never reached such a tremendous figure," says the Times. The record number so far was that for September 1916, in the height of the Somme fighting—322. But during April, according to the official reports, "the enormous number of 717 aeroplanes were brought to earth as the result of air-fights or by gun-fire." Of these, 369 were German—269 of them brought down by the British and 98 by the French. The British lost 147; the French and Belgian, if the German claims can be trusted, 201.

It is a terrible list, and a terrible testimony to the extreme importance and intensity of the air-fighting now going on. How few of us, except those who have relatives or dear friends in the air-service, realise at all the conditions of this fighting—its daring, its epic range, its constant development!

All the men in it are young. None of them can have such a thing as a nerve. Anyone who betrays the faintest suspicion of one in his first flights is courteously but firmly returned to his regiment. In peace the airman sees this solid earth of ours as no one else sees it; and in war he makes acquaintance by day and night with all its new and strange aspects, amid every circumstance of danger and excitement, with death always at hand, his life staked, not only against the enemy and all his devices on land and above it, but against wind and cloud, against the treacheries of the very air itself.

In the midst of these conditions the fighting airman shoots, dodges, pursues, and dives, intent only on one thing, the destruction of his enemy, while the observer photographs, marks his map with every gun-emplacement, railway station, dump of food or ammunition, unconcerned by the flying shells or the strange dives and swoops of the machine.

But apart from active fighting, take such a common experience as what is called "a long reconnaissance." Pilot and observer receive their orders to reconnoitre "thoroughly" a certain area. It may be winter, and the cold at the height of many thousand feet may be formidable indeed. No matter. The thing is done, and, after hours in the freezing air, the machine makes for home; through a winter evening, perhaps, as we saw the two splendid biplanes, near the northern section of the line, sailing far above our heads into the sunset, that first day of our journey. The reconnaissance is over, and here is the first-hand testimony of one who has taken part in many, as to what it means in endurance and fatigue:

"Both pilot and observer are stiff with the cold. In winter it is often necessary to help them out of the machine and attend to the chilled parts of the body to avoid frost-bite. Their faces are drawn with the continual strain. They are deaf from the roar of the engine. Their eyes are bloodshot, and their whole bodies are racked with every imaginable ache. For the next few hours they are good for nothing but rest, though sleep is generally hard to get. But before turning in the observer must make his report and hand it in to the proper quarter."

So much for the nights which are rather for observation than fighting, though fighting constantly attends them. But the set battles in the air, squadron with squadron, man with man, the bombers in the centre, the fighting machines surrounding and protecting them, are becoming more wonderful, more daring, more complicated every month. "You'll see"—I recall once more the words of our Flight-Commander, spoken amid the noise and movement of a score of practising machines, five weeks before the battle of Arras—"when the great move begins we shall get the mastery again, as we did on the Somme."