“The chief’s got his bill through Congress, the bombing tests on those German battleships are going to take place this summer, and you, Slim, are ordered immediately to Langham Field, Virginia. You’re going in advance of the picked flyers who’ll drop the said bombs upon the bodies and persons of the Ostfriesland and other boats, and you’ve got to be out of here on the four o’clock train to San Antonio. Get under a cold shower, take some salts, drink a lot of icewater, pack the extra sock of yours, and may —— have mercy on your soul!”
II
All of which more or less accounts for the fact that I, Slim Evans in person, was ensconced on the edge of Chesapeake Bay three days later. Langham Field is in the commonwealth of Virginia with the bay bounding one edge of it. All around it on the other sides there are marshes and estuaries and swamps and puddles and so forth.
The mosquitoes have a formal review each night, and march and countermarch up and down any face within reach. Every once in a while there comes an order for them to take careful aim and fire. The first night I spent in the officers’ barracks I had no screens on my windows, and the mosquitoes were so thick that when I started to throw my shirt in a corner it just hung right in the air.
Seriously speaking, I was in a very pleasant frame of mind at that, and I wouldn’t be far wrong if I said that just about every other flyer in the service was in a similar mental condition. Granting, of course, that any man who flies for a living has any mind at all to be in any condition whatever.
The facts were that for weary months General Mallory, the chief, had been lifting his melodious voice to high heaven, Congress and the world at large, insisting that a bunch of airplanes flying out to sea with bombs aboard could considerably embarrass any navy approaching our shores. The fact that I was at Langham Field was simply due to the fact that Congress had finally taken a few dollars out of the appropriation for a new post office with a solid gold cupola for the town of Four Forks, Arkansas, and added it to the money which had been set aside to dredge the Yahee River in Mississippi and turned it over to the Air Service. The latter money was made available when the Yahee turned out to be a brook which had temporarily dried up.
The Air Service, I already knew, had developed a four thousand pound bomb, but the dope was that for the tests mere peas, as it were, weighing only two thousand pounds, would be used. It was the general’s contention, which seemed to the naked eye to be well-founded, that a few of these eggs, each with a yolk consisting of a thousand pounds of T. N. T., when laid alongside a battleship might embarrass it a trifle.
In fact, he had an idea that said monarch of the seas might become extinct almost immediately. It meant plenty for the Air Service if they could prove that they could fly a hundred miles or so out to sea and bother a navy. And when one gets down to hardpan, every flyer I ever knew has a certain pride in his corps which is seldom equaled and never surpassed in any organization I know, from the Independent Order of Odd Fellows to the Queen’s Own Royal Mounted Sussex Fusileers, which organization acts as bodyguard to the Prince of Wales, I understand, and have heavy casulaties daily as men die of heart failure, trying to follow him around.
I had but vague ideas of just what the plans were, and least of all as to why I had been ordered on ahead, until I reported to Major Lamb Johnson next morning. Major Lamb Johnson is a fox-faced little fellow with a spike mustache consisting of five hairs on one side and four on the other. He has a habit of blowing frequently with a loud report, and when he comes down to earth again the second lieutenants can be found fainting on the ground all around him.
He was striding up and down his office when I entered. From the windows of it I could see the long line of huge, corrugated iron hangars which bounded the southern edge of the field, and the one huge dirigible hangar on the northern side. Eastward was Chesapeake Bay, and on the western boundary were a few more hangars and some frame administration buildings.