Part of our job is to read the men’s letters and censor them: our men are extraordinarily good at their work and I never wish for any better, but, taken all round, their letter-writing is not very original. This is not perhaps to be wondered at, as they are not allowed to give any news of the war, and they of course know that everything they write is to be censored. About the only topics that are discussed at all are the two most primitive ones, consisting chiefly of requests for food and raiment, and the sending of loves and kisses, the more indiscriminate the better. One hero wrote four identical letters to four different girls. One’s own time for letter-writing is limited, and this effusion has taken parts of three whole days to write. It is done in the intervals of flying; testing bombs and detonators and other fireworks, with which we try to enliven things occasionally; seeing after guns, engines and machines; avoiding Staff officers; trying to talk French to Belgian N.C.O.s who are lent to us with their men for making improvements to our aerodrome; and other work, such as drawing maps to satisfy the insatiable curiosity of the G.O.C., and devising means to appease the voracity of the fellow members of one’s mess.
Now I am sitting on the ground under a sort of tent, where bits of my engine are being improved by my expert mechanic, and I am writing on a tin of castor-oil. My finger is still bandaged up, so the pencil is not very easy to work. After yesterday’s fine summer-day, of course it is foggy and cold, raining and drizzling, so no one can fly, as nothing can be seen; and there is a peaceful feel and a busy hum of machine tools in camp.
On the last foggy day that we were up, we saw something suddenly loom out of the fog, and, thinking it might be a Hun machine, swerved towards it, but only for a second; luckily we swerved off again just in time to miss the cock on top of the steeple of a well-known church on a hill by a few feet—very unpleasant!—the ground being invisible at the time. One evening, on the way out for a raid, I came across a large eagle, flying at about fifteen hundred feet. The surprise was mutual. It was the first time in my life that I saw one of these fine birds completely lose its head, and in an attempt to avoid what it probably thought was a super-eagle, it warped its wings the wrong way and actually side-slipped like a badly flown aeroplane, falling—headlong—a few hundred feet. The last we saw of it, it had recovered, and was flying rapidly away in the opposite direction.
Yesterday my observer and I had an extraordinary experience when chasing an Albatross biplane. While behind his own lines the Boche was some 12,000 feet up, and when we first saw him our machine was some 2000 feet lower. The German tried to get away and dive home. There was no chance of catching him at the time, so we turned away and went and hid in a big cloud, in the hope that the German would come back to continue his work in our absence. This of course is quite an ordinary manœuvre and usually works. Once inside the cloud, however, trouble began, as it rapidly developed into the worst type of thunderstorm cloud, in which the air currents are very rapid and revolve in a most disconcerting manner. It was also very wet and cold, and quite dark. This made flying extraordinarily difficult, and after a short time we had not the faintest idea where we were or whither we were going. Things started falling about inside the nacelle, and it was soon quite obvious that the machine was flying or falling on anything but a level keel. Finding my automatic pistol trickling between my legs, I turned my eyes inside the machine and anxiously watched the instruments, which I was horrified to see were behaving very oddly; for instance, the compass was gyrating madly, like a puppy chasing its own tail; the aneroid-needle, which was supposed to show our height above ground, was quivering with the rapid variations of atmospheric pressure, but yet enabled me to grasp the alarming fact that the earth was approaching at an extremely rapid rate. The speed indicator, which in this particular aeroplane consisted of a column of red liquid actuated by pipes, connected with a special type of nozzle fixed on one of the struts of the machine, amused itself by gurgling up and down between thirty and a hundred miles an hour; and the red liquid added injury to insult by spilling itself over my new breeches. Besides this, the rudder, the elevators and the balancing ailerons sometimes took effect and sometimes did not; all of which added to the terror of the approaching flashes of lightning, the horrible feeling of being utterly unable to control the machine, which was by this time careering about in the noise and darkness like a frightened horse.
The German aeroplane, too, was known to be about, and there might well have been an awful collision, without a second’s warning, in the middle of a thunderstorm cloud.
Suddenly the observer looked round with a grin and pointed to a light patch in the darkness; this rapidly cleared, and, as the visibility increased, I recognised one of the canals. It was not underneath me, as one might expect; it was right out, beyond one wing-tip. The machine, therefore, was obviously falling in a quick spiral towards the canal.
The worst of the vortex having been safely passed, the damp of the cloud changed into sleet, which froze on the machine and on our faces and goggles; so that in addition to attending to the machine and gun, both of us unfortunate occupants had to be continually wiping our glasses. Our clothes, too, were wet through, outside from the cloud, and inside as the result of the very violent exercise taken in hanging on to the bucking aeroplane and in controlling it. Never have I worked so hard for mere existence, and never have I had a more unpleasant time.
But all was now comparatively plain sailing, and once the machine was got under control, everything was more or less comfortable again. The machine was actually in the cloud for about a quarter of an hour, and had flown some ten or twelve miles and had dropped 5000 or 6000 feet. To add to the entertainment, the storm had burst during the process, and the thunder and lightning were studied at close range. Man-made shells are pretty beastly and are apt to kill if they hit one, or go bang near enough, but they aren’t nearly so frightening as the Almighty’s automatic display, if you happen to be on the stage. The enemy did open a pretty hot fire on the machine when it emerged, but we could not really be bothered on that occasion to take any notice of it. A further search was made for the German machine, but no trace of it could be found anywhere in the sky, so we supposed that the fright it got was enough for it and that it had gone home for good, in which it showed its wisdom.