Читать книгу Over the Front in an Aeroplane, and Scenes Inside the French and Flemish Trenches - Ralph Pulitzer - Страница 5

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Paris, August 13th (Friday).

I have just returned from a unique visit to the front. This afternoon I flew in an army aeroplane from Paris to the fighting lines, skirted these lines for a few kilometres, and flew back to Paris.

We made the round trip without a break.

I am indebted to the quite exceptional kindness of the French Foreign Office and of the French War Office for this flight. No other civilian has been allowed to ascend in a French army aeroplane at all, and as for visiting the front in one, it has apparently been undreamed of. Poor Needham went up in a British military aeroplane, but what he saw and felt were buried with him.

I received definite word yesterday evening that at four-thirty this afternoon I would find a military motor at the door of my hotel; that it would take me to the great aviation station in the suburbs of Paris, and that at five-thirty o'clock a double-cylindered battle-plane would set flight with me.

Everything ran like clockwork. At five o'clock I was shaking hands with the Captain of this most important aviation station, and he was explaining to me just how, day and night, his aeroplanes guarded Paris from German air attacks.

At five-thirty o'clock I was struggling into a heavy leather suit which I put on over my regular clothes and a heavy padded helmet which was carefully fastened under my chin by a buttoned flap and also an elastic band.

A few minutes later I was climbing sinuously into my seat in the front of the aeroplane while my pilot wormed his way into his seat a few feet behind me. A few seconds later the two great propellers (or rather tractors) began to flash around. With a snap and a roar the battle-plane started slowly forward, gained in speed till we were running along the big field like a racing automobile, then suddenly the people standing around dropped away from us as if on a gigantic express elevator leaving one standing on the upper floor of a skyscraper, and in a moment more the earth had become a strange and placid panorama with which we had no connection or concern.

On and up, on and up, we flew, headed straight as an arrow for the closest portion of the battle-front, ninety kilometres (about fifty-four miles) away.

As the vast crazy-quilt of numberless shades of green and brown rolled slowly below us I had time to pay more attention to my immediate surroundings. I sat in the front, or observer's seat, of a great new French biplane which the English call a battle-plane, and the French call an "avion de chasse," or "hunting aeroplane." They call their smaller single-motored machines their "avions de réglage," or "regulating aeroplanes." But these great biplanes they fondly call their hunting aeroplanes, for with them they hunt the Taubes and the Aviatiks of the enemy, and they tell me that their enemy usually gives them a wide berth.

I found myself sitting in a little cockpit strapped to a comfortable seat. A few inches in front of my nose was the breach of a heavy machine-gun whose muzzle projected over the bow of the fuselage. At each side of my seat, under my elbows, were coiled long belts of cartridges for the machine-gun. In the floor of the little cockpit, right in front of my feet, was a little glass window through which I could watch the ground passing directly (though some thousand feet) underneath. Just behind this window, in the floor under my feet, was a little metal trap-door. By straddling my feet I could open this, for the purpose either of taking vertical photographs or of dropping bombs. Only the three long, shell-like bombs which generally hang in straps to the left of the observer had been removed, as had also the Winchester rifle which hangs to his right.

I could get an uninterrupted view of the scenery across a space of about four feet right ahead. Further to right and left the view flickered curiously through the lightning-swift twirling of the propeller-blades. "Don't stretch your head out in front to either side," had cautioned the aviation Captain before I left the earth, "or you would certainly get guillotined." I craned my neck gingerly round to look beyond me. In another little cockpit about four feet aft sat the pilot. I could see his face peering over the edge through a low windshield. Past his head on each side I got a view of the country we were leaving behind.

This happened to be a farewell glimpse of Paris. It stretched vaguely away, bathed in the late afternoon sun and yet shrouded in heavy haze and smoke, a sort of bird's-eye Whistler.

Now feeling the air becoming distinctly colder, I looked ahead again. For a time we had been flying at 1,000 metres. Now we gradually climbed to 2,000 metres. The outrunners of the clouds began to drift by in wisps of what seemed like mist. Below, the earth looked like the display of a carpet-merchant's dreams. Square carpets, oblong carpets, long strips of carpets, carpets of light green, of dark green, of every intermediate shade of green; carpets of fawn color and of brown, thin carpets and carpets of wonderfully thick pile, plain carpets and carpets with symmetrical designs in light brown dots (several thousand feet nearer those dots would have resolved themselves into homely haycocks).

Now the carpets stopped as we sailed over a forest of dense dark green with little mirrors stuck in it, which, when looked at through my field-glasses, proved to be not the tops of greenhouses, as I had at first imagined, but big lakes.

And now the wisps of mist became banks of fog. As we still climbed on upward through these white banks the earth could only be seen in isolated dark patches. Higher and higher we climbed, till finally the earth was entirely veiled by the clouds below us. At a height of 3,000 metres, or 9,900 feet, we straightened our angle and on an even keel headed away toward the front. It was a magnificent sight. We were flying along in a clear belt between the lower and the upper clouds. Below us stretched an unbroken white ocean of these lower clouds. The sun was just high enough to shed its slanting beams along the surface of this snow-white sea. Above us were the lowering masses of the higher clouds.

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"BELOW US STRETCHED AN UNBROKEN WHITE OCEAN OF

THESE LOWER CLOUDS"

In this lonely world of our own we flew forward at 130 kilometres (80 miles approximately) an hour. The air was very thin and cold, but for some reason there was no rush of wind against my face. If I moved my head to right or left I could feel the wind from either propeller, but in the middle it was relatively calm. The air felt very thin to breathe and I had to swallow constantly to keep clearing my ears and the tubes back of my nose.

On and on we flew, until finally I felt, instead of hearing, a violent rapping. Turning my head, I saw the pilot hammering with his right fist on the deck between our cockpits to attract my attention. He grinned amicably and opened his mouth wide. I could see he was shouting at me, but could not hear the faintest sound over the roar of the propellers. He pointed to the whiteness below us a little to the right. Then he wrote an imaginary word with his forefinger on the deck between us. I could not read it upside down. I opened my leather coat, and with the cold instantly biting into my chest, hauled out my notebook and pencil and stretched them out to him. He shook his head and indicated that he could not take both hands away from steering. So I buttoned up my coat again in some perplexity.

Then, without abruptness, with a certain sickening majesty, the aeroplane stood on its head and swooped down onto the surface of the white sea below us. As it swallowed us we began to spiral rapidly around as though we were tobogganing down a giant corkscrew. As we went on down through this white nothingness I became very dizzy. The propellers had slowed 'way down and I thought the engines had failed, and that we were either falling 10,000 feet or making a forced descent. But the pilot sat still back above me, so I did likewise.

Suddenly we spiralled violently down through the bottom of the cloud into sight of the earth again. Instantaneously the engines broke into their old roar and the aeroplane stopped pointing straight down and assumed a steep slant. If any one ever heaved a sigh of relief I did it then.

I felt the rapping behind me. Looking round, I saw the pilot pointing down at the earth, ahead and to our right. I shook my head. Then, as we careened downward, he stopped his motors for a fraction of a second, and in the sudden deafening silence he shouted out, "The front!"

Here, if my hopes had materialized, I should be able to give a most striking picture of a battle as seen from an aeroplane. But honesty compels me to say that any one who wants to get a good clear view of the front had much better go there on the surface of the earth, and not through the air.

In the first place, it takes quite a little time and trouble to discern the lines of opposing trenches even when you stand on a quiet observation post with a General painstakingly pointing and explaining, by the help of landmarks, just where they run. Here, though we were now only 1,000 metres (about 3,300 feet) up, we were racing along the front at 80 miles an hour, and all my friend the pilot could do was to point here and there frantically. So among the maze of white lines I saw running below me through the hazy atmosphere, some which I took for trenches were undoubtedly roads; some which I took for roads were equally undoubtedly trenches, while only a few, by their zigzagging, could I unhesitatingly have guaranteed to have been trenches.

In the next place the roar of the engines totally drowned out all the reports of the guns which were going off below us, and the explosions of the shells, which are such a striking feature of the front.

To make matters still more undramatic there was no battle going on at the precise moment when we shot downward out of the clouds, but only a rather languid artillery exchange. Even a regulating aeroplane which was sailing around directly below us and about half-way down between us and the earth, correcting the fire of some batteries, was having an exceptionally peaceful time of it. We could look down and see plainly the red, white and blue circles of France painted on the tops of its planes, but there were none of the customary woolly little white clouds of German shrapnel bursting round it during the few seconds that it remained in sight.

Furthermore, the guns right below it and us were so cleverly concealed that they were quite invisible. The only signs of its being a front at all were the bursting shells from the French batteries. These little puffs of smoke in the hazy distance the pilot spotted unerringly, but he had a discouraging time pointing them out to my unaccustomed eyes as we raced along.

So this, I fear, is all that any one visiting the front by aeroplane would have seen this afternoon. Possibly had we hung around longer we might have seen more, but the pilot and I both had important dinner engagements in Paris, and the sun was getting very low. We therefore reluctantly swept around and, leaving the silver band of the Aisne behind us, started for home.

We kept low, not over 1,000 metres, so that the landscape was very clear and interesting. First we passed over the city of Compiègne, where I had lunched with Dr. Carrel only three days before to the accompaniment of an artillery obligato. Then right over the big, dark green Forest of Compiègne where I tried but failed to locate a château I had visited with Mme. Carrel. Then on and on over a further entrancing exhibit of parti-colored carpet fitting together at the edges as snugly as any completed picture-puzzle.

Before long we reached Senlis, where I had stopped on my way to Compiègne the other day to take snap-shots of the streets of houses gutted by the Germans during their brief occupation before the battle of the Marne. Passing over Senlis, we dropped lower, so that I could get a clear bird's-eye view of the havoc. Then on and on, without incident, till the smoke of Paris came in sight, and on and on again, till I looked down through a thousand yards or so of space on the aviation field from which I had started just one hour and twenty-five minutes earlier.

Suddenly the motors stopped, the aeroplane keeled over onto the tip of its left wing and, pivoting round on it, we began our dizzy spiral descent. First on one wing-tip, and then on the other, we corkscrewed dizzily down. First the whole surface of the earth would swiftly fly up, revolving as it came, and slap me on the left side of the face, then, a fraction of a second later, the same revolving surface would heave swiftly up to slap me on the right side of my face. This double spiral descent is certainly by all odds the dizziest proceeding that was ever devised by man.

Finally, with a swoop which I made sure would carry away most of the chimney-pots of the suburb, we made a beautiful glide and alighted on the grass of the aviation field as smoothly as a canoe launched from a beach into a quiet lake.

Here one would think our day had ended, but there was one very vivid thrill left.

As the aeroplane came to a stop a mechanic came running up, carrying a pneumatic wheel. He spoke a few sharp words to the pilot, and the latter asked me to get out quickly, saying that he would return and explain some of the details of our flight a little later. So I scrambled out, the machinist scrambled into my place, carrying the pneumatic wheel, and with a rattle and a roar the aeroplane rolled across the field and leaped into the air again.

I joined some aviation officers and asked what was the matter. They pointed to a machine a few thousand feet above us, and explained that in leaving the ground that machine had lost one of its pneumatic wheels. The aviator was ignorant of this, and, unless warned in time, would, on trying to make his landing, turn turtle and get killed. My pilot had gone up to meet him in the upper air and by waving the wheel at him indicate his predicament, so that he could land on the left wheel and tail of his machine.

"Unless he understands before he lands he is a dead man," said the officer. This really was a dramatic spectacle—the one aviator soaring on guard high in the sky in complete unconsciousness of the death that awaited him; the other, climbing nearer and nearer, then circling round and round in narrowing circles. Finally, the first machine started down.

"He understands," said some one.

"No, he doesn't," said others.

"Get the ambulance ready," ordered the aviation Captain, and the engine of the motor-ambulance began to chug with a most sinister effect.

We all stood perfectly powerless and watched the machine spiral down. As he made his glide, men stood in the field waving spare wheels at him to insure his understanding. But no. Instead of landing tilted to the left on his sound wheel and tail, he made his landing leaning over a little to the right where the wheel was missing. As it touched the earth the great machine buried its nose in the ground, its tail rose and rose till it stood perpendicular, and then fell forward in a somersault, so that the plane was lying on its back.

"He's finished. Get the ambulance," ordered the Captain.

We all started at a run across the field toward the motionless aeroplane, the motor-ambulance following close on our heels. As we got to the wreck a figure crawled out and began to swear fluently at not having been warned in a way that a sane man could understand. How the aviator escaped will always remain a complete mystery. But his escape made a happy climax to the thrilling ending of an unforgettable afternoon.