High Adventure

t the école Militaire d'Aviation, eager as they were to complete their training, and to be ready, when spring should come, to share in the great offensive, whic

late place as we looked at it from our windows, watching the flocks of crows as they beat up against the wind, o

s?" they seemed to say. "Then

stors, fair-weather fliers, who

istant from Paris,-less than an hour by train,-the country round about our camp seemed to be quite cut off from the rest of the world. With the exception of our Sunday afternoons of leave, when we joined the boulevardiers in town, we lived a life as remote and cloistered as that of some brotherhood of monks in an in

real. The war was always in the background of one's musings, and while we were far removed from actual contact with it, every depopulated country village brought to mind the sacrifice which France has made for the cause of all freedom-loving nations. Ev

nt, and there were many of those despised of all the rest, the embusqués, as they are called, who hold the comfortable billets in safe places well back of the lines. It was very easy to distinguish them from the men newly arrived from the trenches, in whose eyes one saw the look of wonder, almost of unbelief, that there was still a goodly world

or those who did come this was the legitimate by-product of glorious adventure and a training in aviation not to be surpassed in Europe. This was to be had by any healthy young American, almost for the asking; but our numbers increased very gradually, from fifteen to twenty-five, until by the spring of 1917 th

h élèves-pilotes had been officers, but most of them N.C.O.'s and private soldiers in infantry or artillery regiments. This very wide latitude in choice at first seemed "laxitude" to some of us Americans. But evidently, experience in training war pilots, and the practical results obtained by these men at the front, have been proof enough to the Fr

ly a common-school education. It is not at all strange that this should be the case, for one may have had no technical training worth mentioning; one may have only a casual speaking acquaintance wit

a serious one, and I think I may truthfully say that we kept pace with our French comrades. The most important thing was to gain actual flying experience, and as much of it as possible. Only in this way can one acquire a sensitive ear for motors, and an acc

ld. And when some inexperienced pilot lost control of his machine and came crashing to earth, they would take the air in a body, circling over the wreckage, cawing and jeering with the most evident delight. "The Oriental Wrecking Company," as the Annamites were called, were on the scene almost as quickly as our enemies t

sed toward those of her children who leave her so jauntily, would clutch us back to her bosom, whenever we gave her the slightest opportunity, with an embrace that was anything but tender. We were inclined to think rather highly of our own courage in

lives in experiment with the first crude types of the heavier-than-air machines. They were pioneers in the fine and splendid meaning of the word-men to

g side. We needed to know more of the horror and the tragedy of it. We needed to keep that close and intimate to us as a right perspective for our future adventures. He believed it to be our duty as aviators to anticipate every kind of experience which we might have to meet at the front. His imagination was abnormally vivid. Once he discu

een shot away. You believe that there is not the slightest chance for you to save your life. What are you going

had no right to ignore the grimness of the business ahead of us. If we did, so much the worse for us when we should go to the front. But beyond this practical interest, he had a great curiosity about the nature of

pleasant imaginings. There was something of the Hindoo fanatic in him; or perhaps it was the outcropping of the stern spirit of his New England forbears. But when he talked of the pleasant side of the adventures before us, it was more than

iste, the first flight round the aerodrome. We had talked of this for weeks, but when at last the day

e usual assembly present. The beginners were there to shiver in anticipation of their own forthcomi

rudder on the turns. Remember how that Frenchman piled u

you go over the woods. The air curr

ot worse over the for

and dive, if you're going to make a landing

ose forward. Scare the life out of you, that drop will

em redress! Where's the

t too bad. Not in a Blériot. Just like falling t

good one. There hasn't bee

warnings to make us uneasy. We took our hazing as well as we could inwardly, and of course with imperturbable calm outw

ed her off gently, and up we went, over the class and the assembled visitors, above the hangars, the lake, the forest, until, at the halfway point, my altimetre registered three hundred and fifty metres. Out of the corner of my eye I saw all the beautiful countryside spread out beneath me, but I was too busily occupied to take in the prospect. I

"broom-stick,"-the control connected with the elevating planes,-and then wait and redress gradually, beginning at from six to eight metres from the ground. The descent would be exciting, a little more rapid than Shooting

ing passed. I brought up on the ground in the usual bumpy manner of the beginner. Nothing gave way, however, so this did not spoil the fine rapture of a rare moment. It was shared-at least it was pleasant to think so-by my old Annamite friend of the Penguin experience, who stood by his flag n

ful dinner to celebrate the end of our apprenticeship. It was a curious feast. We had little to say to one another, or, better, we were both

y branch of aviation service, and became familiar with other types of French machines. But the brevet tests, which every pilot must pass before he becomes a military aviator, were the same in every department of the school. The triangles were two cross-country flights of two hundred

e following morning, ready to make an early start. A fresh wind was blowing from the northeast, but the brevet moniteur, who went up for a short fl

accustomed to such emotional outbursts on the part of aviators who, by the very nature of their calling, were always in the depths of despair or on the farthest jutting peak of some moun

ithin a radius of one hundred kilometres. We studied it at close range, on a table, and then on the floor, with the compass-points properly orientated, so

he amounts which might be exacted by farmers for damage to growing crops: so much for an atterrissage in a field of sugar-beets, so much for wheat, etc. Besides these, we had a book of detailed instructions as to our duty in case of emergencies of every conceivable kind-among others, the course of action to be followed if we should be compelled to land in a

ll was our Ordre de Service, th

and R--, by the route of the air, flying an avion Caudron, and leaving the école M

Le Capit

ant de

learance papers from Cadiz. "By the route of the air!" How the imagination lingered over that phrase! We had the better of Columbu

, finding that his motor was running satisfactorily, he struck out in an easterly direction, his machine growing smaller and smaller until it vanished in the early morning haze. I fol

r. It was a unique one, for I was still a little incredulous. I had no

ooking down on it now, it seemed no larger than a toy cathedral in a toy town, such as one sees in the shops of Paris. The streets were empty, for it was not yet seven o'clock. Strips of shadow crossed them where taller roofs cut off the sunshine. A toy train, which I could have

es of villages and fine old chateaux, and great stretches of forest, and miles upon miles of open country in checkered patterns, just beginning to show the first fresh green of the early spring crops. It looked like a world planned and laid out by the best of Santa Clauses for the eternal delight of all g

ne travel by route of the air? If people knew the joy of it, the exhilaration of it, aviation schools would be overwhelmed with applicants. Biplanes of the Farman and Voisin type would make excellent family cars, quite safe for women to drive. Mothers, busy with household affairs, could tell their children to "run out and fly" a Caudron such as I was driving, and feel

rubs became trees, individual aspects of houses emerged. Soon I could see people going about the streets and laundry-maids hanging out the family washing in the back gardens. I even came low enough to witness a minor household tragedy-a mother vigorously spanking a small boy. Hearing the whir of my motor, she stopped in the midst of the process, whereupon the youngster very naturally took advantage of his opportunity to cut and run for it. Drew doubted my veracity when I told him about this. He called me an aerial eavesdropper and said that I ought to be ashamed to go

field. We shook hands as though we had not seen each other for years. We could not have been more s

-looking sight in his flying clothes, with a pair of Meyrowitz goggles set back on his head, like another set of eyes, gazing at the s

there; but it was too profound to be pleasant. A relief to get down again, to he

ins, with the cars filled with babies; old men having after-dinner naps in twenty-three-metre Nieuports, fitted, for safety, with Sperry gyroscopes; family parties taking comfo

h the most delightful reluctance. He quickly lost his reserve, and in the imaginative spree which followed we went far beyond the last outposts of absurdity. W

in. We were to make our second landing at R--. It was about seventy kilometres distant and almost due north. The mere na

delighted you were with the name of a little town we passed through on the way to Or

te to the eastward, so that we might look at some villages which lay some distance off our course. I wanted to fly by compass in a direct line, without following my map very closely. We had planned to fly together, and were the more eager to do this because of an argument we had had about the relative speed of our machines. He

of leisure to enjoy the always new sensation of flight and to watch the wide expanse of magnificent country as it moved slowly past. I le

olly old man who liked boys, and always kept the sky swept clean and blue. The other took a sour delight in shirking his duties, so that it might rain and spoil all our fun. Perhaps it was Drew's sense of lo

ine toward R--. Our moniteurs had often cautioned us against being comfortably certain about anything while in the air. It was our duty to be uncomfortably alert. Wind! I wonder how many times we had been told to keep it in mind at all times, whether on the ground or in the air? And here was I forgetting the existence of wind on

ne, knowing that all the earth was in shadow, gave me a feeling of exhilaration. For there is no sensation like that of flight, no isolation so complete as that of the airman who has above him only the blue sky, and below, a level floor of pure white cloud, stretching in an unbroken expanse toward every horizo

ped-up masses which came drifting by at various altitudes. They were scattered at first and offered splendid opportunities for aerial steeplechasing. Then, almost before I was aware of it, they surrounded me on all sides. F

hasty revision of my opinion as to the calm and tranquil joys of aviation, thinking what fools men are who willingl

for an outlet, but the clouds closed in and in a moment

it. The indicator had leaped up fifty kilometres an hour above safety speed, and I realized that I must be traveling earthward at a terrific pace. The manner of the descent became clear at the same moment. As I rolled out of the cloud-bank, I saw the e