I may say that never once during the war did I see a crash happen in which a man got killed—nor did I ever see a dead man; and I may also say that the first fatal accident which happened to anybody in any of the squadrons to which I was attached, from October 1915 to April 1918, occurred in my last flight when my pilot was drowned and, owing to my injuries, I left the squadron. Night flying in those days was, so it appeared to me, a safe though exciting occupation. At any rate (and I touch wood as I say it!) not only did I lead a charmed life, but wherever I went trouble seemed to fly away. There were no accidents of any serious nature, or any damage caused by enemy attacks at any place to which I was attached. Two months after my crash eight hundred bombs were dropped in two nights on Condekerque aerodrome, and it was so badly damaged that it was abandoned. There were also many casualties. This is, however, by the way.
When we have examined the wreckage curiously, and all the inevitable photographs have been taken, we proceed to the mess for lunch, and during coffee I suggest to a friend of mine, an eighteen-year-old baby with fair hair, that we have a look at the war and visit the lines in a car.
"All right," he says, "if you tackle Charlie!"
Charlie is the transport officer. He is not far from sixty, but by shaving twice daily and wearing waisted coats he preserves an air of perennial youth. He has been, and done, everything in his life—from ringmaster to pageant manager, from running flying meetings to the caring for Kings at royal performances. He is one of those wonderful young "old stagers" in the war who really were fearless. He would go over the lines every night if he could, and indeed had been low over the German trenches in the daytime—"shooting up the blighters" for fun. He was the raid officer, and, as such, stood to his post on the "band-stand" all night, despatching machines and seeing them back. In his hands were the responsibility of our life or death. He loved us all, and would do anything for us. When the man beside him was killed in the big raid, he carried on his work, smoking his cigarette, with his eyeglass in his eye. His favourite expression, if we did not raid owing to weather, was—
"Gor perishin' blimy with pink spots! If you put wings on my old band-stand I'd fly her through Hell backwards! Why don't you go on a raid to-night—you blighters never do any work?"
So having given him a whisky-and-soda, I take him into a corner and unveil the plot.
"All right! Tell Dimmock to give you a tender. Mind you draw that cartoon of me or you'll never leave the perishing aerodrome again!" he says.
In a few minutes we are on the Nieuport road, and for half an hour we rush in the tender beside a canal, past various kinds of French and British transport waggons. No one challenges us, and even as we pass the frontier the French and Belgian guards look at us with scant curiosity.
"Aviation Navale Anglaise!" we chant as we pass. Well they know the Royal Naval Air Service whose cars have haunted the roads now for many years. Well they know whose are the fighting scouts that rise up towards the skies above Dunkerque.
Through La Panne we clatter, and then the feeling in the air begins somehow to change. We sense now that the lines are nearer, and indeed they are only eight miles away. We pass through an area full of hutments and dumps and depots of various descriptions. The increasing number of notices and signs give unmistakable evidence of our proximity to the zone of action. The roads are now packed with lorries and cars through which we can hardly pass. On the left all the time is the unbroken line of the grass-covered sand-dunes hiding the not-far-distant sea from our eyes. Then suddenly the traffic thins and vanishes. We turn a corner and face a stretch of empty road, and know that now we are really near the front. Half-way down the road we pass a look-out tower built up among the trees, and near by is a warning notice.