With our army in Flanders

by Valentine Williams

A Belgian doctor who called upon me in London in April, immediately on his arrival from Belgium, told me of a dramatic account of the British air raid on the railway at Courtrai, given to him by the guard of a train which had been standing in the station at the time. The man had been wounded, and my Belgian friend had been called in to attend him. The guard said that, on the appearance of the British aeroplane over the station, a number of German soldiers rushed out on to the line and started to fire at the raider with their rifles. The British airman suddenly planed down, and the Germans, thinking he had been hit, streamed together with shouts of joy into a dense crowd to await his landing.

But their triumph was short-lived. When he was not more than a hundred feet from the ground the raider dropped four bombs in rapid succession right into the midst of the crowd; then, with a quick jerk of his elevating plane, soared aloft and away. The bombs worked havoc among that dense mass. A score or more of soldiers and railwaymen were killed, and as many more wounded. The train was wrecked; and as for the guard, who was a German, the doctor said he became positively panic-stricken at the mere thought of what he had seen that day.

The development which the war has produced in what I may call air tactics is positively prodigious. It must be remembered that, at the outset, the aeroplane had practically never been tried on active service, for the experiments made in the Tripoli and Balkan wars, and by the French in Morocco, were more in the nature of sporting flights than serious military tests. Our pilots have had to learn by their own experience in the air—and a gallant and bravely bought experience it has been—the fighting tactics of the aeroplane. They have had to learn to distinguish “by silhouette” the different types of German machine, and to discover the most efficacious way of dealing with each one, according as the position of the propeller and of the driving-seat in relation to the planes restricts the field of fire of the enemy machine-gun. They have had to learn for themselves how to manœuvre for position when tackling an adversary in the air, to find out the vital spots in the different types of enemy machines.

Active service has brought them their first taste of flying under fire. They have learnt to keep a cool head with high-explosive shrapnel from the enemy “Archies” bursting all around them, and bullets from the machine-guns of attacking aeroplanes whistling about their ears or rustling through the canvas stretches of their wings. They have learnt to make those twists and turns, those swoops and dives, which I have so often seen them making high in the air above the lines, to avoid those pretty little puffs which carry instant destruction in their folds of white smoke.

Just as a certain temper of nerve is required of the airman, so must he also possess special faculties of observation to fit him for military work. The air observer must be cool-headed and resolute. Above all things he must possess a certain measure of intuition which will complete, which will fill in the details, as it were, of the picture which his sharp eyes must pick out in relief from the blurred chessboard of fields and roads and trees far beneath him.

Only experience will teach even the keenest eye to observe fruitfully. Only the trained eye, reinforced by a good military brain, will detect in that black thread on a white strip troops marching along a road, or distinguish a moving train in that white smudge gliding over a dark background. Only the trained mind will appreciate the military significance of these observations. Where the intuition comes in is in making the correct deductions from the things observed, and fitting them into their right place in the general scheme of our information of the enemy’s movements. Intelligent map-reading at the height at which aeroplanes in war are compelled to travel is more than an acquired accomplishment; it is a born gift.

Where a pilot and an observer venture forth together in one machine, they must work in closest harmony. Like bowler and wicket-keeper in one of those successful combinations with which we are familiar in county cricket, each must divine by intuition the intention of the other. In the roar of the propeller, the rush of the hurricane, communication by word of mouth is hopeless, and even the portable telephone is of small avail.

Now the observer is the captain on the bridge, the pilot the chief engineer in the engine-room. Now the rôles are reversed. Destruction threatens, and the pilot takes command. The observer can lean back and commend his soul to God, while his comrade strains every nerve to avert a swift end by a bullet in the air or a more terrible death on the cruel earth a mile below.

Though only two years old, the Royal Flying Corps has already created its own distinctive atmosphere. I can only describe it as a subtle blend of the free-and-easy good-fellowship of the navy with the kind of hectic dare-devilry which is characteristic of airmen everywhere.

Not that the foolhardiness of a certain type of airman that we all know is tolerated in the Royal Flying Corps. Its spirit demands high courage, cool nerve, and absolute devotion to duty, on the part of every one of its men, but feats of the “looping the loop” order are strictly repressed. It is to keep this spirit out of the Corps that the rule has been made forbidding any “advertising” of individual airmen by name in connection with their flights on military service.