FlightGlobal.com
Home
Premium
Archive
Video
Images
Forum
Atlas
Blogs
Jobs
Shop
RSS
Email Newsletters
You are in:
Home
Aviation History
1916
1916 - 1012.PDF
HE must have curtailment of soul, or a shrivelling understanding, who can read of that mighty aerial battle on the Somme and not feel the blood course at increased speed through his arteries. Oh, that some photographer, braving the flying bullets, may have taken a film of it, even though at a great distance ! For it is something new in warfare, something of wliich most of this generation failed to dream of as a possibility, only a decade ago. Ten years ago the conquest of the air was pro gressing slowly, but ten years ago the picture of 70 or so aeroplanes meeting in bloody battle over but a few square miles of country, and only a few thousand feet in the air, that all at hand might view, was so fantastic as to be beyond the witchery of ordinary brains to visualise. Yet now that it has happened, it needs no gazing into crystal globe to magnetise the imagination into condition of subtle, physical sensibility, endowing power to reconstruct even from the meagre reports available, a picture true in substance and potential in iact. Passively receptive of impressions, I have but to •close my eyes to have a delineation of the evolutions conveyed to me equivalent to the visions of a camera- obscura. Above me is the blue dome of heaven, itself •desecrated by mundane progress in that its ether must respond to the crackling of wireless telegraphy, conveying by and through its ethereal body, messages of prospective death. Around me, so far as eye can reach, the earth is torn and scarred as by the upheaval of some mighty subterranean agitation. Ditches and conduits, hollows and trenches, a disturbment of the whole topsoil and subsoil as though the plough of a modern ^oliath had passed that way bent on the refiguration of the landscape. Pre-existing woods and forests are now but as a garnered cornfield, their timberous stubble standing gaunt and desolate. Hills "have been swept away in their entirety; valleys exist where before there were none. The horizon is broken by silhouetted ruined churches and homesteads. And in all that vast panorama, not one living soul of all those responsible for this casting down of the beautiful in Nature and the glories of man's handiwork in his sane moments, can be seen Incessantly, apparently from out the bowels of the earth, there leap flashes of fire and smoke. The ground^ trembles at the shock, the air tremors deal staggering blows, the roar is thundrous in its rever berations. At intervals, kite balloons are main taining their positions, slowly swaying from side to side in the breeze, their occupants, sole visible presence of humanity, keeping keen observation. Wireless vibrates abroad the information, tele phones voice the news, a whole fleet of enemy aero planes are speeding in our direction. Swift from the ground our machines leap into the air to give battle, meeting their opponents a mile or so before our lines. Not with any exhilarating clash of battle do these antagonists meet in mid-air, but silently except.for the insistent hum of engines, they circle and swoop and manoeuvre like giant seagulls, the smoke from exhausts tracing fantastic curves and figures in the air. Muffled poppings reach the ear,- at times like the distant rolling of drums. Sometimes they are in staccato, sometimes in bursts, as the pilots scheme for positions enabling their gunners to get home with their weapons. •A Fokker is the first to get into difficulties. After a close operation in which the two machines appeared to revolve around in close proximity to a common axis, she veers away at an alarming angle, which suddenly increases to a headlong dive, belching flames and smoke as she crashes down, mercifully beyond our vision. Here is a British biplane which is set about by three of the enemy. It is fearsome odds, yet she fights on until like a winged partridge she flutters away, making giddy dives, recovering to sideslip first to port and then to starboard. A dive, she is gone. No, by almost a superhuman effort her pilot has flattened out to some extent and attempts a landing wing down. She lands at a terrific speed, runs a little way, and turns bodily over with a sickening crash. Above the fight goes on. Again a machine is fluttering back somehow to friendly lines, there one is falling like a dead leaf, and all the time that in cessant popping. Right in the foreground is one of our machines that has not fired a shot for possibly a few minutes—it seems 30 to the watchers—but is apparently doing all it can to get away from the remorseless two that beset it. Afraid ? No. A gunner beyond the power to fire another shot, and two enemy gunners mercilessly emptying drum after drum into one that cannot reply. Suddenly, head down as straight as ever fell rocket stick she goes, engine full out. Seconds only, and her enemies are left far above, their duty done. But not to pile up below. Once clear, her pilot flattens gently out, and returns to earth with his gruesome burden. It was but an evolution to get clear when put out of action. Brave riders of the air, who fight at fearful altitudes without one thought of the space beneath you, intent only on doing your duty. Brave mothers and wives who patiently wait at home to conjure up in your minds pictures such as the foregoing. Death. Ah, yes, I know there must be death. It seems an unwritten law in this chequered existence which we call life, that no one person can have pleasure except at the cost of sorrow to others. It seems, sometimes, that it were almost impossible for one to live, except by the death of another. Yet Kin of yours, and Kith of mine, not one of our lost ones but have done far more good in dying for England, that they could ever have done by living. 1004
Sign up to
Flight Digital Magazine
Flight Print Magazine
Airline Business Magazine
E-newsletters
RSS
Events
