Читать книгу Tom Slade with the Flying Corps - Percy Keese Fitzhugh - Страница 4

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Tells briefly of the extraordinary episode which ended his service in the Flying Corps, and gives also a glimpse of his adventurous career.

The reports in the American newspapers of the loss of Tom Slade, aviator, were read by his many admirers and friends with a sense of shock and with feelings of personal bereavement.

Notwithstanding that his former comrades on this side of the water had not seen him for more than two years and knew that the character of his service, as well as his temperament, would be sure to take him where danger was greatest, the accounts of his dramatic end, set forth in cold type, seemed hardly believable.

It is the one familiar name in the casualty lists which brings the war home to one more forcibly than does the loss of a whole division.

But for all that, we received the news pretty calmly and made little fuss until after the great metropolitan dailies had mentioned poor Tom as a national hero. Then we sat up and took notice. When the Tribune phoned to our local Scout Council for a photograph of Tom (“any photo would do,” they said) our own Bulletin published an editorial which would have made poor Tom ashamed to walk down Main Street. And when the Times blazoned forth the heading,

JERSEY FLIER DIES A HERO

our Bulletin got another photo from Tom’s scout patrol and printed it on the front page. Then the Girls’ Patriotic League got hold of this picture and had it enlarged, and it was displayed for a week or more in the window of Blanchard’s Drug Store.

All we needed was a little nudge from New York and then we paid our tribute proudly and handsomely.

But there was one quarter where pride was lost in a sense of personal sorrow and bereavement, and that was in the local scout troop, of which Tom had been a member and a moving spirit.

I remember very well meeting Roy Blakeley as I stepped off the train that afternoon and, knowing him for the light-hearted youngster that he was, his condition seemed pitiable.

“Have you got a New York paper?” he asked me. “Is it true?”

He had evidently been waiting for the evening papers which came down on the train that I usually take, and as he stood there, trim and spruce in his scout regalia, his hat on the back of his head as usual, and craning his neck for a glimpse of the paper even before I unfolded it, his evident grief went to my heart.

“Yes, it’s true, I’m afraid,” I said.

“You remember about Quentin Roosevelt,” he almost pleaded. “They thought for a while he was saved—taken prisoner——”

“Yes, that hope was justified, Roy,” I told him, “because all that was known for a few days was that he had been in combat with a Hun plane and had not returned. This is different. You’ve got to face the fact and not flinch, just the same as Tom faced the enemy—without flinching.”

I opened the paper and we stood there together in a little recess of the Bridgeboro Station, and while I read the article aloud Roy’s eyes were riveted upon it, as if he almost doubted the truth of my words. In the Temple Camp office in the big bank building across the street hung a service flag with a single star upon it. It was there that Tom Slade had been employed. I noticed how Roy’s eyes wandered over to it every few seconds as if that, since it still hung there, somehow proved the falsity of the published reports.

JERSEY BOY’S DRAMATIC END

THOMAS SLADE OF THE FLYING CORPS

PLUNGED THREE THOUSAND FEET TO DEATH

WHILE PURSUING BOCHE PLANE

HEROIC TRIUMPH PRECEDES HIS TRAGIC END

Wreaks Vengeance in the Clouds Before He Falls.

Vow to Kill Hun Who Bombed American Hospital

Kept in Thrilling Victory in the Skies

The War Department confirmed today the Associated Press report of the loss of Thomas Slade, aviator, in the fighting west of Rheims, while in pursuit of an enemy plane. Slade, who was known among his comrades as “Thatchy,” was exceptionally popular and his tragic fate has cast a feeling of gloom throughout the section where he had been lately stationed. His superiors in the Rheims section had no hesitancy in describing his last exploit as unquestionably showing skill and daring of the first order, and his loss will be keenly felt in the service.

Further details of Slade’s end are awaited, but it is feared that little more than the bare facts of this sensational climax of his career will be forthcoming. A strong touch of human interest characterizes his final part in the war by reason of an announcement the youthful flier is said to have made to some of his comrades. When the Germans crossed the Marne in their recent advance a Boche machine dropped bombs upon a Red Cross hospital near Epernay, killing two women nurses. Slade himself was a patient in the hospital at the time, recovering from a slight wound he had received near La Chapelle. He was on the veranda of the little hospital at about dawn, following his restless habit of wandering about within the prescribed limits, and chafing under a convalescence which he believed was needlessly keeping him from service. He saw the Boche plane drop the bombs in the first light of dawn and watched it escape while two French fliers pursued it. One of the nurses, a French girl, had cared for the young American, and his comrades in the hospital are said to have recalled that his sorrow and anger were so great that he expressed the resolve to find and kill this Hun messenger of frightfulness if he lost his own life in doing so.

This resolve was kept in the dramatic combat which ended Slade’s career.

By what means he identified the enemy machine is not known, but he is known to have pursued it till both machines disappeared in the clouds over the enemy lines. The character of the tragic conflict which took place in the concealment of that dizzy height can only be conjectured, but the enemy plane was seen to fall, and the strong wind which had blown up in the west brought it into the little village of La Toi, just within the Allied lines. The machine was a total wreck and though its pilot was quite dead and frightfully mangled from his tremendous fall, it was evident from a wound on his forehead that he had paid the penalty of his cowardly and despicable act before he fell less than five minutes after his fall Slade’s machine was seen to descend, first coasting, then fluttering as if without control, and when still more than a thousand feet in the air it plunged headlong to the ground. Its occupant was seen falling separately and both are known to have struck upon the rocky hillside where the Germans made such stubborn resistance in the fighting of last Tuesday. It is a matter of deep regret that the body of the gallant young American, crushed and mangled as it must have been, did not fall within the American lines.

“He might have——” Roy began in a kind of daze.

“No, my boy,” I told him. “we may as well face the fact. No man in the history of this world ever fell a thousand feet without having his life crushed out. Even if he landed on a haystack instead of a jumble of rocks, it would have killed him. Look here——”

I felt as if I were myself guilty of some form of brutal frightfulness as I pointed to the little supplementary notice upon the substance of which I supposed that the government had based its official confirmation of Tom’s death.

An official report to Washington states that a German aviator, flying over the American lines, dropped the cap which Slade had worn into an American camp. It contained the metal identification disk which the young flier had worn on a cord around his neck, and a small badge linked with it which is thought to signify some honor greatly prized in the ranks of the Boy Scouts of America. With these trinkets was a note in German saying that young Slade had been buried in the village of Pevy and that a cross with his name upon it had been placed over his grave.

I think neither of us spoke for fully a minute. I am sure that Roy could not have trusted himself to speak.

“So you see,” I finally said, “that even the Huns recognized his gallantry and his heroism.”

“They had to,” said Roy with a kind of pitiful defiance.

We strolled up the hill, neither of us speaking.

“You know what badge it was, don’t you?” he asked.

His earnest question and the evident struggle he was having with himself gave me a momentary pang of regret, almost of shame, that I had never taken a very lively interest in the Scouts and especially in this one who had died a hero.

“No, I’m afraid I don’t, Roy,” I confessed.

“It was the Scouts’ Gold Cross,” he said. “It means he risked his life to save a fellow when he was a scout.... It was a little sick fellow that he saved.”

“His wearing it shows how he always remembered the Scouts, doesn’t it?” I observed weakly, for I hardly knew what to say.

“None of the people here really knew him,” he said, ignoring this remark.

“He was probably of a more retiring nature than you, Roy,” I said. But the pleasantry was lost upon him.

We strolled on up the hill in silence and stood for a moment chatting in front of his home, which is one of our show places here in Bridgeboro.

“Mr. Ellsworth found him down in Barrel Alley,” Roy said; “he was a hoodlum. After he got to be a scout he went ahead of us all. Even Mr. Temple had to admit it—and you know how kind of grouchy—as you might say—Mr. Temple is sometimes.”

I nodded, smiling.

In a general way, I did know the story of how John Temple had become interested in the Scouts through the reclamation by them of this hapless orphan, and before I left for France myself (which was on the following Friday), I learned more of the young hero’s history. I have since had reason to regret that I did not look more carefully at the several pictures of the boy which were displayed in Bridgeboro after the news of his death reached us. They were pictures of a Boy Scout, to be sure, and two years makes such a difference in a boy’s appearance that I dare say I would not have recognized the aviator from the stolid-faced, khaki-clad youngster whose photo our local paper reproduced with such vaunting pride.

It was Mr. Ellsworth, that untiring scoutmaster, who told me the story of Tom as far as he knew it. He said that as Tom had been the best all-around hoodlum in town, so he had become the best all-around scout; that it was attributable directly to Tom’s wonderful reformation that Mr. Temple had been drawn, neck and shoulders, as he said, into the scouting movement and had founded and endowed Temple Camp in the Catskills, which I believe has come to be regarded as one of the finest scout camps in the country.

He told me how Tom had left the Scouts to work on a transport; how his ship had been torpedoed and he had been taken aboard a German submarine and incarcerated in a German prison camp. From that point information about him was scanty and contradictory. He had escaped (so Mr. Ellsworth had heard) from the prison camp and somehow had made his way to France where he was next heard from as a motorcycle dispatch rider.

How and when he had got into the Flying Corps Mr. Ellsworth did not know, for he had been heard of as an aviator only a month or two prior to the shocking news of his heroic end.

For a week or two after the news came, the name of this heroic young scout was on every lip, but I must confess that when I went away the thought which lingered with me most persistently was not so much that of the young fellow whose career had been so varied and remarkable but of that comrade of his scouting days who took the young aviator’s loss home to himself with such a sense of personal bereavement. Stouthearted champion as he was of his friend’s prowess, I verily believe that the heart which beat under that trim scout regalia was still buoyed up with a forlorn hope that some belated report might yet prove the government’s authenticated announcement to be false. There was a kind of heroism in this challenge to careful and methodical old Uncle Sam which I am afraid appealed to me more even than did Tom’s exploits and noble sacrifice, and I felt that if I could only do the impossible and assure Roy that his friend still lived and would come home, it would afford me a keener joy than I had ever known.

I cannot for the life of me say what the reason was for Roy’s making a particular confidante and companion of me during the few days that I remained in Bridgeboro. Perhaps his memory of our stroll up the hill together the day the sad news reached town, and the fellowship of sympathy which then sprang up between us, made him regard me as in some special way his friend.

However it was, on the morning that I left home for the long journey which was to mean so much to us both, I found Roy swinging his legs from the railing of my porch waiting, so he explained, to help carry my luggage down to the station. In the stressful days to follow I always remembered him as he looked then—a roguish smile upon his face which had been so clouded with his brave grief, his scout hat on the back of his curly head and the scarf he always wore hanging loosely around his neck. I was quite taken aback by this undeserved attention.

“You said you didn’t know much about the Scouts,” he reminded me. “One thing about them is that a scout has to do a good turn every day, and I just happened to think this would be a good one.

“I hope I may be able to return it some day,” I said, quite overwhelmed.

“Then I’d only have to do another one,” he answered briskly. “You’d only make matters worse.”

“I see,” I laughed, letting him take one of my grips.

So we went down the hill together and I was glad to see that his accustomed buoyancy was gaining the upper hand at last. We did not speak of Tom until the train had actually come to a stop and he handed me my grip.

“As long as you’re going over there,” he said, rather hesitatingly, “maybe you’ll hear more about Tom—how he died, I mean.”

“France is a big place, Roy,” I warned him, “but if I can get any details be sure I’ll remember them to tell you; I’ll remember that I owe you a good turn,” I added.

Thus we parted. And I am afraid, as I said before, that I thought more about Roy on the way over than I did about his dead hero pal. As the great ship made her perilous way in silence and darkness through the danger zone, I thought of the trim figure which had waited for the evening papers at the station on that sorrowful day, of the service flag with its single star hanging in the window across the street, and of this same trim figure, with its brown face and clear eyes and curly hair, swinging its legs from the railing of my porch, waiting to do me a good turn.

I am afraid that I did not think so much about that lonely, rough-made grave in the little village of Pevy in devastated, bleeding France.