Later Type of French Scout.
The gun mounted on the upper wing is aimed by pointing the machine and is fired by the pilot.
Airmen are not, as a rule, of a romantic or a literary temperament. Pursuing what seems to the onlooker to be the most adventurous and exhilarating of all forms of military service, they have been chary of telling their experiences and singularly set upon treating them as all in the day's work and eliminating all that is picturesque from their narratives. Sergeant James R. McConnell, one of the Americans in the French flying corps, afterwards killed, tells of a day's service in his most readable book, Flying for France, in a way that gives some idea of the daily routine of an operator of an avion de chasse. He is starting just as the sky at dawn is showing a faint pink toward the eastern horizon, for the aviator's work is best done in early morning when, as a rule, the sky is clear and the wind light:
© U. & U.
Position of Gunner in Early French Machines.
Drawing forward out of line, you put on full power, race across the grass, and take the air. The ground drops as the hood slants up before you and you seem to be going more and more slowly as you rise. At a great height you hardly realize you are moving. You glance at the clock to note the time of your departure, and at the oil gauge to see its throb. The altimeter registers 650 feet. You turn and look back at the field below and see others leaving.
In three minutes you are at about four thousand feet. You have been making wide circles over the field and watching the other machines. At forty-five hundred feet you throttle down and wait on that level for your companions to catch up. Soon the escadrille is bunched and off for the lines. You begin climbing again, gulping to clear your ears in the changing pressure. Surveying the other machines, you recognize the pilot of each by the marks on its side—or by the way he flies.
The country below has changed into a flat surface of varicoloured figures. Woods are irregular blocks of dark green, like daubs of ink spilled on a table; fields are geometrical designs of different shades of green and brown, forming in composite an ultra-cubist painting; roads are thin white lines, each with its distinctive windings and crossings—from which you determine your location. The higher you are the easier it is to read.
In about ten minutes you see the Meuse sparkling in the morning light, and on either side the long line of sausage-shaped observation balloons far below you. Red-roofed Verdun springs into view just beyond. There are spots in it where no red shows and you know what has happened there. In the green pasture land bordering the town, round flecks of brown indicate the shell holes. You cross the Meuse.