Up to the present the greatest aid given by the air service to any of the armies in this war is that of acting as scouts; or, in other words, the air service supplies the eyes of the army and navy.
Much is said of the time when thousands of planes will be used as offensive weapons on a large scale. It is quite possible that in the future this will come to pass; but up to the present, spasmodic bombardments of fortified positions by a few planes, and the useless murder of non-combatants by German zeppelins, has been the limit of the attacking power of air fleets. There are spectacular fights in the air between airmen of the opposing sides; and, when one considers the limited perspective of a man living in a seven-foot ditch, the monotony of such a life, and man\'s natural love of competition, one can easily understand the deep interest taken in these air duels by the men in the trenches.
One sometimes sees six or seven battles in the heavens in one afternoon, and another dozen machines driven back by shells from our anti-aircraft guns. Tennyson\'s prophetic words, written long ago in Locksley Hall, are indeed fulfilled:—
For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained
a ghastly dew
From the nations\' airy navies grappling in the central blue;
Let us hope that after this war for liberty and freedom has ended in the subjugation of militarism, his further prophecy in regard to "the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world" may also come true.
When airmen fly over their opponent\'s lines, they are first met by shells from anti-aircraft guns and bullets from machine-guns, and between the two they are often forced to return to their own side of the lines. It is a beautiful picture, on a clear day, to see these machines, swerving this way and that, diving, ascending, out of the path of this rain of shot and shell that greets them, though it rarely brings them down. The swaying machine, cutting its way through the hundreds of white and black puffy balls, caused by the bursting shells, is a sight for gods and men; and the men, at least, never tire of watching it.
A very amusing incident, in this connection, is told by the officers of a certain Canadian battalion of infantry. Their original Lieutenant Colonel, now a General, came of a well-known and able, though rather egotistical and bombastic Canadian family. When in the trenches this Lieutenant Colonel always insisted on being accompanied by his batman or a special runner whose duty it was to carry a Ross rifle ready loaded. When he saw a German plane soaring over No Man\'s Land toward him, anywhere from ten thousand to fifteen thousand feet in the air, he would cry:—
"Quick, give me that rifle!" and, putting it to his shoulder, he would pump shot after shot in the direction of the distant airman. If the latter chanced to go back from whence he came, the Lieutenant Colonel would turn to those about him with a satisfied and triumphant smile of self-approbation:—
"Ah, I\'ve turned him back," he would say.
When he learned, as he occasionally did, that he had been filling the sky with lead in a mistaken effort to hit one of our own machines, it worried him not at all, for the knowledge he had that he had "turned back" hundreds of Hun planes prevented an occasional slight mistake from damping the ardor of a spirit such as his.
When the war is over he may rest assured, as he no doubt will, that no Canadian, no Britisher, yes, it might even be written, no man, had done more in this great war to accomplish the defeat of the Hun than he!
Very often, while you are looking up at a shelled aeroplane, the bits of shrapnel and shell are heard thudding into the earth all about. On one occasion my commanding officer and I lay on the ground in a shower of this kind, while a short distance away a soldier of another battalion was severely wounded by a piece of shell casing. It is strange that more men are not hit in this manner, and the same remark may be made of the few who are wounded in proportion to the number of shells poured over in an ordinary bombardment.
A young airman described his work to me as "much monotony, and a few damned bad frights"; and this may be taken as a description of almost any branch of the service at the front. The phrase, "a young airman," is very appropriate in speaking of most of our heroes of the air, for they are often only boys of nineteen or twenty years of age who, with the recklessness of youth, but the courage of veterans, risk their valuable young lives in dangerous reconnaissances or in battling with the enemy a mile or two in the air. Strange that buoyant, happy young fellows like these, with all their lives before them, should value the future less than those who have lived more than half of theirs. But this is the case; and it is stated, truly, that the steadiness of nerve of these heroic youngsters surpasses that of older men.
One day we relieved the —— battalion in the lines, and as the trenches were veritable mudholes, Major P—— and I took to the fields and crossed overland to our rear lines, passing through our long line of Howitzers and field guns on the way. As our batteries were just about to open a heavy strafe on the enemy, to find out the strength of their artillery on this front, we sat on the edge of a shellhole to smoke a cigarette and watch the effect of the bombardment. The batteries near us had eight or ten men to each gun, using a small derrick to carry into the dark breech of the gun the heavy shell. This was pushed home, and behind it was shoved in the charge of guncotton. Then the metal door—for all the world like the door of a small safe—was closed and bolted. The range having been given from a row of figures called across by an artillery lieutenant with field glasses, the gun was brought to the proper level by one man turning a wheel, while another, gazing through a clinometer, told when the proper range was attained. Another man pulled a string, the gun belched forth its death-dealing load, and we watched the shell bursting a mile or two away over the German lines, with a flash, a great upheaval of earth, and a cloud of smoke high in the air.
Presently to our right we heard a machine-gun playing its rat-a-tat-tat. Looking up we saw one of our own planes spitting its stream of fire at a large, red, German flyer that had been doing much damage to our machines on this front for some weeks. The Hun plane was above, thus having the advantage. Suddenly his machine made a nose-dive downward, like a hawk swooping down on its prey, and as the German had speed very much in his favor, he quickly arrived at the position he desired. His machine-gun poured forth bullets, and to our horror we saw that the tail of our aeroplane was cut cleanly off by them, as though by a huge sword. The machine, having no guiding rudder, immediately turned nose downward, and we sighed sadly and felt sick at heart as we thought of the gallant young chaps falling rapidly to their death.
It is always with a sinking feeling that you watch one of your own machines brought down. You can\'t be entirely without pity even for the enemy under the same conditions. For when a man dies in a charge, or even when he is mortally hit by a sniper\'s bullet or by a shell, he is either killed instantly, or he is brought ba............