Tom Slade with the Flying Corps: A Campfire Tale

by Percy Keese Fitzhugh

I sent you a cable via Paris and Rouen. Tom Slade is alive and with me here in Switzerland. I waited four days before sending the cable in order that there might be no shadow of uncertainty about the facts, which seemed hardly believable. I think this will go through to you without much delay since the armistice has been signed. But you’ll probably not see us for several months.

Tom is in care of the physician in Solothurn, the nearest town of any size, and I am sure he is in good hands. He cannot leave here for several weeks, however, and when he does we shall probably be delayed in France in connection with getting his discharge or at least an extended furlough. I understand the censorship is off, so this should come to you unopened but in any case keep the whole business close until I return. I have already written a sketch of Tom’s adventures for you but if there is no objection in any quarter I would like to publish this whole extraordinary business, first and last.

I can hardly collect my own mind sufficiently to give you a straight account of this amazing climax of Tom’s career, and I will not now tell you anything contained in the several batches of story I mean to hand you. For you might as well know the whole thing. Tom himself is in no condition to talk and contradicts himself a great deal. But of the essential truth of what he tells me there can be no doubt.

He is suffering from shock incident to the terrible experience he had and this, I think, was aggravated by an injury to his head which he had previously sustained.

In the neighborhood where this final experience of his occurred it is current among the French peasants that the body of Slade fell from the clouds ten minutes after his machine crashed to earth. I mentioned this supposed superstition in the narrative which I shall give you, saying that such a thing was manifestly impossible. It is a fact, however, that the victim fell ten minutes after Tom’s machine descended. But the victim was not Tom Slade. You’ll hardly credit your senses when you read this, but the body which fell on the rocky hillside was none other than that of Toby Schmitt, son of Adolph Schmitt, the Bridgeboro grocer!

This unspeakable young scoundrel was in the German service and was the moving spirit of their spy activities along a front of a hundred miles or more. He was, in fact, the Captain Toby, or Monsieur le Capitaine, whom you shall hear of in my narrative. Tom learned of this young traitor’s presence along the front where he was on a secret mission in France and saw his photograph, which he instantly recognized. He also learned the means by which he might identify this arch villain—a double cross on the observation balloon which he often used.

As nearly as I can gather from Tom (for he has to be handled carefully still), the machine he was pursuing ascended into the clouds where, apparently, its occupant was to seek orders from the balloon which was anchored there. But of that, of course, he is not certain. He downed the enemy flier and was about to shoot at the balloon when something happened to his machine gun. You may imagine his chagrin at finding himself thus helpless, especially when he noticed two black crosses on the balloon’s car.

I think he must have been in a frenzy of rage and desperate resolution to do what he did. I am hoping that later he will be able to give a clearer account of it, and the doctor assures me that he will be. I gather that he circled about the cable of the balloon until finally in some way he was able to get hold of it. That he should have sacrificed his plane and trusted himself to this cable is an evidence of his towering resolve. The doctor thinks that even at that time his mental state was perhaps not quite normal.

In any event, he knew what he was going to do. That he raised himself, hand over hand, up that cable there seems no doubt. And he got into the car. He says that “Schmitty” which was the name he knew young Schmitt by in Bridgeboro, was frantic with fear, and so he must have been to see this redoubtable creature lifting himself up through that cloud-filled air and finally coming aboard like a pirate over the side of a ship. Yet he dared not cut the rope for that would be to release his balloon and put it at the mercy of the wind.

Before Tom was yet within the car, Schmitt, who was apparently unarmed, or at least unprepared, reached down and secured the knife which Tom carried in his pocket. Tom was powerless to prevent this since his hands were upon the rope. This is an American Boy Scout knife and I myself later found it in the wreck of the balloon.