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Aviation History
1918
1918 - 0916.PDF
AUGUST 15, 1918. REVIEWS. "LA GUERRE DES NUES." Racontee par ses Morts. By M. JACQUES MORTANE. " Broke to every known mischance, lifted over all By the light, sane joy of life, the buckler of the Gaul,Furious in luxury, merciless in toil. Terrible with- strength renewed from a tireless soil,Strictest judge of her own worth, gentlest of man's mind First to face the truth and last to leave old truths behind—France, beloved of every soul that loves or serves its kind 1 " —Rudyard Kipling. IT was George Bernard Shaw, was it not, who confessedthat he found himself unable to criticise adversely a perform- ance by Ellen Terry, no matter the play, so completelyhad this gracious lady cast her spell upon him. In some- what similar case am I, when confronted by a book fromM. Jacques Mortane. "La Guerre des Nues" is a worthy pendant to the trilogythis beguiling writer has given us. It has been wrought out of letters written to their home-folk by pilots now dead, andthese many-coloured epistles have been blended, as might be expected, with a masterly tenderness and a befittingreverence. Some are so light, so racy, so shot with the hues of the livingsun-light, and so flecked with the laughter the gods have given, that it is hard indeed to believe that the gay-heartedboys who wrote them lie cold and still. The book may not make the reader happy—it cannot fail to make him proud.Proud that in a world defiled and agonised by ravening beasts the young knights go out with " Sursam corda " for theirdevice, and an easy jest to cover their feelings. And proud to think that we and our one-time " gentlest enemy, France "are together, " on the side of the angels." In fact, the whole book is marked by a nobility and pridewhich are the deeper for being constrained. As I read it, I found my mind harking back to old days inParis, and old sights, half forgotten. The sombre grandeur of Napoleon's tomb in the Invalides, where he who would seethe great sarcophagus, devoid of all inscription, must bow his head to do so. A carved phrase, bitter cold and resolute,bearing the date of 1870, calling on Frenchmen to remember certain matters, and the grey statue of the lost province ofXnxembourg, draped in wreaths of immortelles. A change in the voice of Sarah Bernhardt when she gives those lines of•Rostand's on the cathedrals of France, and the ringing, insurgent message of the " Marseillaise." •_ ., Yes, M. Mortane, we perfectly understand. . . ri • • • • • • 'I sometimes think that when the rest of us are but for- gotten dust some of the stories in this book will not be utterlylost, and our children's children will read how the men of our time fought Apollyon in the air, seated in flimsy kites of clothand timber, and, reading, will marvel. Such tales as the Capitaine Roeckel tells so casually, afterhe has enquired solicitously about all his folk, and given them heartening little messages about his well-being, and the com-parative safety of his work in the " Winged Army." ' Yesterday I went out on a reconnaissance over the greatbattle between Virlon and Longwy. Seeing a German diri- gible on the ground, I flew over it to drop darts, in spite ofthe cannonade which welcomed me as soon as I got within range."At the second salvo a high explosive shell made me nose-dive, but after considerable trouble I managed tostraighten out again, although their stuff was exploding in thunders all about me. I could; see nothing. . ., Suddenlythere is a formidable crash under my machine; the motor stops, and the little machine, buffeted and flung about by theterrific displacement of air, starts to spin slowly down. It gathers ^speed, and drops two thousand metres like a stone.In vain I struggle to rectify matters, the controls will not answer. I drop through a thick layer of cloud, and seedirectlybeneath me the citadel of Longwy in flames. It is towards this raging furnace we are rushing I At about 1,000 metres themachine changes position, and begins to spin giddily on the tip of the left wing. I make desperate efforts to turn herhead out of it, but it is sheerly impossible. "Two hundred scant metres from the flames—and weslacken slightly, perhaps the heat, that I can feel already, has produced a favourable upward eddy \ She begins to answerthe helm. With the strength of despair, I wrench her right again. But where can I land ? In the flaming citadel ?There, at Jeast, I should not be made prisoner. . . . " My observer shouts to me: "There among the troops—perhaps they are Germans 1" We go into a long glide, and at 100 metres I recognise our plucky infantry. There is yeta^chance; I land as close to them as possible, bullets whistling aBout us as the wheels touch the shell scarred ground. I woulddo thirty-six loops to get out of this hell! The infantry fiaa my unreserved appreciation. At last we are sheltered, andI return, clopin-clopant, to my nest." The book bristles with the names and deeds of famous men,Capt. Guynemer and the Sous-Lieut. Donne, Matton, Quenne- han, and Triboulet, Rockwell and Ball, a gallant host departedthan whom no man's love was greater. Intimate little storie3, told with a warm sincerity. The too-brief career of a personalfriend of the writer, the adjutant Poisard ; "he was my "blue," says M. Mortane, and perhaps nobody but a French-man could know what is in that simple little phrase, for the '• bleu " in the French service is an older and war-hardenedsoldier into whose charge the new recruit is given, that he may guide, philosophise, and generally befriend him. We may safely leave to men of this temper the punishmentof that fool, " who has said in his heart, ' There is no God,' " to those who fought—"till Death, marvelling, closed on them,"and of whom Kipling has written :— "They bought us anew with their blood, forbearing toblame us. Those hours which we had not made good when theJudgment o'ercame us. They believed us and perished for it. Our statecraft, ourlearning Delivered them bound to the Pit and alive to the burningWhither they mirthfully hastened as jostling for honour, Not since her birth has our Earth seen such worth loosedupon her 1 " R.HJB. "OUTWITTING THE HUN." NOT all the adventures in a flying man's career are met"with in the air—at any rate not in wartime. Certainly, Lieut. Pat O'Brien has given us one of the most thrillingbooks of the war, and yet his work as a pilot was early cut short. Three chapters suffice to tell us what happened from the timehe left the States to join the R.F.C. until he awoke to find him- self in a German hospital. Then his chances of regaining hisliberty seemed slender indeed. Not only was he badly wounded in the mouth, but as he stood six feet two inches the possi-bility of slipping away unobserved was a remote one. Although he resolved to take any opportunity which offered to get away,it was a bold bid for freedom which he made when he flung , himself from a train going full speed, and by its very audacityit thoroughly deserved its success. From that point, Lieut. O'Brien's progress, by devious waysand dark, during seventy-two days—or rather nights—until he dug, with his bare bands, a passage under the triple barrierof barbed and electrically charged wire which to-day marks the "boundary between Belgium and Holland, was beset with-hazards.' If the book falls into the hands of the Germans, they may well tremble, the bombastic proclamation of then-War Lord notwithstanding, at the task of endeavouring to defeat a nation which produces such resourceful sons. It is a book which every one who has the spice of adventureshould not fail to read. True, Lieut. O'Brien has not the art and craft of the professional story-teller, but truth is everstranger than fiction, and the book is not the less fascinating if the writing does lack a little polish here and there. It ispublished by Mr. William Heinemann, and the price is 6s. net. ••SHORT FLIGHTS." IN his dedication " Spin" tells us that " Short Flightswith the Cloud Cavalry " is a maiden effort, and he may well be proud of it. He has the gift of description, and contrivessuccessfully to give us a couple of dozen peeps into the vie intime of the newest order of Knights-Errant on active service/He attains his object every time with a minimum of words and without any straining after effect, so that whether his subjectis grave or gay, there is always a convincing air of reality in - the telling which makes the reader ask for more. rEach of his little snapshots introduces us to a typical per-* sonality of a flying squadron, or to some particular phase ofits work, and although, as he points out, times have changed- ' somewhat—" no longer do mist and clouds mean an indolentday spent in exploring some ancient French Town "—sine* they were written, the "intrepid aviators" are still the •same; the main difference is that their work has been speed ed up. "Those indispensable people," the mechanical maniac, 914
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