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Aviation History
1913
1913 - 1012.PDF
|/J2GHf SEPTEMBER 20, 1913. AEMCHAIR REFLECTIONS. B7 THE IT is most curious how one remembers things that happened long years ago with ease, and yet has to make some sort of an effort to remember things but of yester day. I remember quite well spending my holidays at Folkestone, more years ago than I care to think, with my parents. I was told that on a clear day one could see France, and was taken up on to some high point and had the coast-line pointed out to me. I am not quite sure now whether I saw it or not, but I have a dim recollection of gazing out across, to me, that huge waste of water, and thinking what a long way it seemed, and how funny it was that there should be more land right out there. Another year—or perhaps it was during the same holiday—I was taken to Dover, and shown a cannon that had an inscription on it which I believe ran, " Load me well and keep me clean, I'll carry a ball to Calais Green," and I again looked out over the water and—well, I don't think I believed it. There may have been land out there, land just like our England, but to me, the sea coast on which I was standing was the end of all things so far as land, and towns and little boys were concerned. Later, when I had occasion to cross the " silver streak," it was at the expense of getting up very early in the morning and going quite quickly to the coast, but there the real journey seemed to commence. There was the boat of such great size, needed, I supposed, to enable it to carry one on such a far journey, and the destination arrived at late at night, tired and weary and worn. Surely a great journey, and one not to be undertaken without great forethought and much preparation. Later came the era of the motor car. I had even heard of people leaving Paris in the morning, motoring to the coast, and arriving in London the same night. Truly France was a long way off. Last Saturday I was at the London Aerodrome, Hendon, watching the racing, when the cry went up that an aeroplane was approaching from without. Many aeroplanes have come in at one time or another from Brooklands or Eastchurch, but this one looked different. When still two or three miles away it was seen that it was an Etrich, and as there was not one in this country we knew it had come from over the water. It came in at a great height, and making a fine spiral, landed with ease and with no more fuss than a machine just having completed a short flight. It had left Calais at about 4 o'clock, and here it was safe and sound in our familiar Hendon at 5.50 p.m. Two men climbed out, neither of them able to speak a word of English, yet they had come here from foreign parts straight as the crow flies. Let your imagination dwell on this for awhile; let it run riot and carry you to what might happen even in the near future. Here are two men, who climb into a machine after tea, in a foreign country, for just a little cruise round, and arrive in a strange country, with strange people, and a strange language, in time to see the last of an ordinary afternoon's racing, and could, if they wanted to, without any very great effort go back again to supper. Time was, not so very many years ago, before the days of the tele graph, and daily paper, that a bloody war has been raging in a country, and peasants, a little removed from the immediate scene of action, have gone on with their daily toil and have known nothing whatever about it until months afterwards. I well remember, as a little boy, DREAMER. when hearing my elders speak of war, feeling quite safe in our little village. Was it not such a very great way from London, and were there not quite forty long miles of railway to be traversed, followed by ten in the carrier's cart, ere reaching that quiet spot so sheltered by the trees ? No invading army could ever find us there. War might rage round our coast, a coast not one in our village had ever seen, or foreign troops might pour into London, but this was too far off, we were quite safe. Since those days that same little village, during our own manoeuvres, has been turned practically inside out. Troops have filled the cottages, guns have stood on the village green where once a year was the excitement of the fair, the only excitement of the year, with the exception of the choir supper in the schoolroom at Christmas. The flagged floor of the " George," the only inn, has rung to the spurs of the trooper, and on one occasion, I believe, the old nth century church, with its short, squat steeple and small, diamond-shaped leaded windows, has held a " church parade." Troopers' horses have stood in dozens outside the forge at the end of the little street of about twelve cottages; under the great elm tree, from a bough of which I once fell, almost on top of the Vicar ! and where the kindly giant of a smith used to weld our broken hoops for a penny, what time we, a round dozen of us, would blow the red cinders up in clouds, by means of the long handle of the bellows, with the cow's horn on the end of it, and, as he used to say, spoil his fire, so that he used to have to scoop water on it with an iron ladle. A thing I could never understand. "Tommies" have hidden, and fired their blank cartridges from behind the very tree (one of many) on which I, working with the labour of love and a blunt knife, carved two hearts and my own and some body else's initials (I forget who's now; I carved most trees in those days), and have drawn water for their horses from the well, down which I once fell, through entering into a competition with other boys as to who could drop a stone into the water without first touching the side. I do not remember going down, but I dis tinctly remember lying on the grass afterwards, looking up into the faces of the entire village. I don't know to this day, who my rescuer was, but I sometimes wonder whether it would not have been as well to All these thoughts generated by the simple arrival of a monoplane from " over there." But does it not give one to wonder ? Things have, and are altering in these days. Time may come when, not the arrival of one, but many machines, may, as has been said, give us " furiously to think," but we may then be too late to do anything but think. The time has come; it is not coming, but has come, when the aeroplane, in the time of war, must be reckoned with. Only to-night I have read of some little mishap to some troops crossing the Thames by a " sapper " built bridge, who had trouble with their horses taking fright in the middle, during which time the "enemy's " aeroplanes circled overhead, at an altitude of three thousand feet, " taking it all in." I suppose that some day, the powers that be will wake up and leave off dreaming, which dreaming can at the moment be well left to " The Dreamer " if only for the fact that he is the one most likely to do least harm. 1038
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