Looking back upon the almost miraculous progress of aviation, it seems to me, and to many others, that humanity rose very high and fell very low when it discovered at last the secret of flight. For thousands of years, perhaps from the days when primitive man stood in a lonely world and watched the easy grace, the swift and joyous liberty of the birds above his head, there has been in the soul of man the dream of that power to fly. Men lost their lives in vain attempts, as far back as the myth of Icarus, whose waxed wings melted in the sun. Scientists studied the mechanism of birds, tethered their imagination to rising kites, sought vainly for the power to lift a heavy body from the earth. At last it was found in the petrol-driven engine, and men were seen to rise higher than the clouds, and to travel through the great spaces of the sky like gods. A pity that this achievement came just in time for world war, and that the power and beauty of flight was used for dropping death upon crowded cities and the armies of youth, crouching in ditches beneath those destroying dragons!
I had no clear vision of that, in spite of the wonderful prophecy of H. G. Wells, when I watched the first feeble attempts of the early aviators in England and France. Those first aviation meetings did not promise mastery of the air except by the eye of faith. For hours, and sometimes for days, we waited on the edge of flat fields while men like Graham White, Latham, Blériot, Hamel, and other pioneers whose names, alas! I have forgotten—there is something terrible and tragic in that quick forgetfulness of heroic adventure—tinkered with their machines, stared at the wind gauge, would not risk the light breeze that blew, or rose a little, after running like lame ducks around the field, and crashed again like wounded birds. Death took a heavy toll of them. There was hardly one of those early meetings in which I did not see one or more fatal accidents.
I was close to the Hon. Charles Rolls, a very gallant and splendid fellow, when he fell. That was at the meeting in Bournemouth which I have mentioned before, when the Mayor challenged noonday itself in an artificial nose, and everybody seemed bewitched by some spell of midsummer madness. There was a flower carnival in progress and pretty girls all in white and sprigged muslin, mounted on floral cars, flung confetti and bouquets at the crowd, who pelted them back. From the flying field, while this was going on, Charles Rolls rose in his machine to perform an evolution which had been set as a competition. It was a death trap at that period of flying, for he had to fly four sides of a small square, and then alight in the center of it. No breeze was stirring, or very little, and the sky was cloudless. But rising sharply to form one side of the square, Rolls’s machine side slipped and fell like a stone. His body lay there for a moment before the spectators were conscious of tragedy. Then they rushed toward him.... A few yards away, the floral cars continued their procession, and the pretty girls pelted the laughing crowds with blossoms.
That was later than the beginning of flight. The first time I realized the almost limitless possibilities of heavier-than-air machines was at Doncaster, when Colonel Cody was among the competitors. The Doncaster meeting had been a great failure from the public point of view. There was very little flying, owing to bad weather and elementary aëroplanes. The aviators sulked in their tents, and the gloomy atmosphere was deepened by some financial troubles of the organizers, so that the gate money was seized to liquidate their debts. At least, that was the rumor, as I remember it. But there was one cheerful man, ever ready with a friendly word and jest. That was Colonel Cody who, after many kite-flying experiments, on behalf of the British government, which had failed to give him any financial aid, was putting the finishing touches to a homemade biplane, with the help of his son. It was a monstrous and clumsy affair. It had great struts of bamboo, an enormous spread of wing space, and a petrol tank weighing half a ton. This structure, which was tied up with string, and old wire, and bits of iron, was nicknamed St. Paul’s Cathedral, and Noah’s Ark, and all kinds of ridiculous names, by correspondents who did not believe in its powers of flight. But they loved to talk to old Cody, dressed like “Buffalo Bill” (though he was no relation of the original Colonel Cody of showman fame), with long hair which he used to wind up under his hat and fasten with an enormous bodkin with which he also used to pick his teeth. I laughed loud and long at the first sight of his immense aëroplane, and refused to credit his childlike assertion that it would fly like a bird. But one morning early, he enlisted volunteers to haul it out of its hangar and set its engine going with the noise of seven devils. “Poor old Cody!” said a friend of mine. “One might as well try to fly with a railway engine!”
Hardly were the words out of his mouth, than the great thing rose, and not like a bird, but gracefully and gently as a butterfly, was wafted above our heads, and flew steadily across the field. We chased it, shouting and cheering. It seemed to us like a miracle. It was a miracle—man’s conquest of flight.
Presently, after three minutes, I think, “something happened.” The great aëroplane staggered back, flagged, and took a nose-dive to earth, where it lay with its engine dug deep into the soil and a confusion of twisted wires and broken canvas about it. With two or three other men—among them a brilliant and well-remembered journalist, Harold Ashton—I ran forward, breathlessly, and helped to drag Cody from beneath the wreckage, dazed and bloody, but not badly hurt. His first words were triumphant: “What did I tell you, boys? It flew like a bird!”
It was patched up again, and flew again, until Cody was killed. He was truly one of the heroic pioneers, obstinate in faith, heavily in debt, unhelped by any soul, except that son of his who believed in “the old dad.” It was he who cured me of scepticism. After seeing his heavy machine fly around the course, I knew that the game had been won, and that one day, not one man, but many, might be carried in an aëroplane on great strong wings.
Edgar Wallace, war correspondent, novelist, poet, and great-hearted fellow, was at Doncaster with Harold Ashton and others, and I remember we played poker, which was new to me, after the day’s work. The landlord of the inn in which we stayed watched the game for a few minutes, and saw Wallace scoop the pool with a royal flush. The old man’s eyes fairly bulged in his head. “It’s a great game, that!” he remarked, and insisted on taking a hand. Wallace had phenomenal luck with his hands and so raked the landlord’s money out of his pockets that he fled in dismay. “It’s a devil’s game!” was his final verdict. However, that has nothing to do with the triumph of flight, except on the part of the landlord.
Another revelation of progress rapidly achieved happened at Blackpool, which coincided with the Doncaster meeting. I went on from one to the other and found the weather at Blackpool frightful, from the point of view of flying. Rain poured down heavily, and the wind was violent—so savage, indeed, across the flat fields of the flying ground that it uprooted the poles of the press tent and made the canvas flap like clothes hung out to dry on a gusty day. Before this pavilion finally collapsed in the gale, I used it as a writing place, and remember sitting there with Bart Kennedy, with our collars tucked up, trying to keep our paper dry and our tempers cool. Bart Kennedy who, as a young man, had tramped about the world, not as a literary adventurer but as a real vagabond of the old style, earning his bread by casual labor, discovered in later life the gift of words, which he used in a crude, forceful, ungrammatical, but somewhat biblical, style to describe his experiences of life in the wild places of the world, and the philosophy which he had extracted therefrom. He posed as a rebel and a man of primitive soul in the artificial environment of civilization, and was adopted by the Harmsworth Press as an amusing freak. Although he was conscious of his own pose, and played it for all it was worth, it was based on sincerity. He was truly a rebel and a natural man, with the honesty, brutality, simplicity, and courage of the backwoodsman. In that tent at Blackpool, I remember his talking to a carpenter who was trying to fix the tent poles.
“Say, old friend, have you ever heard of Jack Cade?”