With our army in Flanders

by Valentine Williams

As the machine righted itself, the pilot regained consciousness. Now they were dangerously near the earth, but, recognizing that with his wound he could not last very long, Liddell turned the machine for home. He made off in a straight line for the nearest flying-ground, which happened to be Belgian. With fifty wounds, as it subsequently appeared, in his leg, faint from loss of blood, he flew for thirty-five minutes, and finally reached the aerodrome, where he made a perfect landing. To those who ran out to greet him he said very steadily: “You must lift me out. If I move I’m afraid my leg will come off.”

When they told me his story there was every chance that the gallant pilot would save his leg, nor did his life seem seriously endangered. But amputation proved necessary, and Liddell did not survive the operation. The Victoria Cross laid upon his coffin was the worthy recompense of his deathless endurance.

Those are three little stories of the Royal Flying Corps. I can think of no higher praise than to say that they are typical of the spirit of our airmen at the front.

There is a freemasonry of the air. Some kind of affinity seems to exist between those who have taken to themselves wings to explore the vastnesses of space. It has survived the snapping of all the other ties that once united us with our present foe. German airmen who rejoice in the slaughter of civilians from the skies show themselves of punctilious chivalry towards their foeman in space. If a British aeroplane goes forth and does not return, it often happens that a message is thrown down in our lines by a German aeroplane announcing the fate of the missing. The Royal Flying Corps, on its side, is equally courteous. There is no place left for chivalry between foemen on earth, it seems, so they have banished it to the skies.

I always think there is an heroic atmosphere about the flying-grounds at the front. It is the privilege of these green fields and gorse-grown heaths, with their fringe of sheds, to witness the finish of these epic adventures in the air. Out of the crystal clearness of the summer evening, from the drifting cloud-wrack of a stormy day, the aeroplanes drone home, laden with their cargoes of glorious deeds. I have seen the airmen go out at dawn. I have seen them return in the sunset. Indeed, where the war correspondents have their headquarters the sky throbs all day with the song of the propellers.

There is a great deal of efficiency and bustle about these flying-grounds at the front. Through the doors flung wide of the hangars lining the ground one gets a glimpse of the fighting aeroplanes, strangely big and cumbrous on the ground as contrasted with their power and beauty in the air. Little knots of mechanics in blue overalls, the natty forage-cap of the R.F.C. poised on one side of the head, swarm about the machines, busied with the engine, changing parts, tightening up wires.

All these flying-grounds at the front are self-contained. The motor-lorries of the Wing stationed there line one side of the aerodrome when they are not away at the railheads fetching stores and supplies. The hum of the lathe, the clink of tools, resound from the travelling workshops by the roadside as from the repair shops installed in sheds and barns about the place. There is a constant droning in the air, faint and soothing like the hum of a bee, from somewhere far aloft where an airman is executing graceful curves on a testing flight, loud and deafening about the sheds where the engines are having their trial runs.

Here is an aeroplane starting off on reconnaissance. Pilot and observer are already in their seats in the midst of a neat arrangement of maps on rollers, compass, barograph, speedometer, pressure gauges, clock, camera, and machine-gun. The biplane, big but frail, its planes shining diaphanously, its metal-work sparkling in the sun, quivers and trembles to the stroke of the roaring propeller. An officer wearing the characteristic cross-buttoned tunic of the R.F.C. is making a parting recommendation to the pilot, who, in his fur-lined leather hood and leather coat and fur gloves, looks more like an Arctic explorer than anything else. The observer, similarly muffled up, is fixing a map in position.

The biplane is standing out in the middle of the field, its nose pointed in the opposite direction from the firing-line, for the airmen will only bring their machine into the wind after they are in the air. The roar of the engine grows suddenly louder as the officer, his injunctions at an end, steps clear, and the biplane slides away over the ground with that curious bobbing motion that one knows. It takes the air easily, steadily, and clambers aloft round and round the aerodrome, then suddenly turns sharply aside and makes off towards the firing-line, twenty miles away.

Not a day passes that one does not see our aeroplanes bound for the front. How often have I stood in the fire-trench and watched one of these aerial reconnaissances—seen our airman, so high that he looked like a tiny moth in a vast domed hall, stealing out over the German lines! Again and again the enemy anti-aircraft guns drive him back, but each time he comes back and each time he sees a little more.