I was to be a lucky man in that there were few branches of the war in which I did not have experience until a German bomb laid me low at Baupaume. I not only got an opportunity to do my country service in the air as a military observer, though it sent me on my first trip to a hospital, but not so very long afterward had the wildest and possibly more thrilling experience in command of one of his Majesty’s ground “dreadnoughts”—the famous tanks.

Mind you, I wouldn’t paint myself as so brilliant and indispensable generally that the aviation corps was trying to steal me from the infantry and the special tank service from doing duty in the air.

But it is to be recalled that I was a trained soldier—that I had had ten years of study and practice of military affairs. I must credit myself with always having been ambitious. And so, when war came I had several strings to my bow that must surely prove of value. One of these was the acquirement of an expert knowledge of wireless telegraphy and telegraphy generally. I had also picked up a considerable knowledge of photography. And naturally I knew gunnery. There was a dearth of men in the British air service at the time competent for an observer’s duty, scarcely more than half enough to man the hundreds of aËroplanes that were being turned out under forced pressure. For the battle of the Somme was now under preparation and it was not only desirable but imperative that Britain’s aviators should take the mastery of the air. Scores of other young officers like myself possessing special qualifications for the work were requisitioned from the other branches of the army and put into intensive training as aviation observers.

The tragedies of Gallipoli and Belgium I had been through had not impaired me in any degree. Shell-shock had not shattered my nerves, physically I was in the best of shape and tests of my vision met all requirements. You can wager though that I said several prayers during my practice flights. Once you got up in the air, however, there would come over you an amazing confidence in the trustworthiness of the fragile planes and the roaring motor.

The darts, loops, banks and volplaning that had at first turned me somewhat dizzy, I found myself getting used to. And there’s another thing about flying. It’s when you get ’way up. The further up you go, the less you think about falling. Or if you do the vastness of the upper regions simply takes all thoughts of self-importance out of a man. You are such a midget in the immensity after all. And you find yourself figuring, “Well, suppose I do drop? What a small thing I am anyway in this great world.” And it sets you thinking of the millions of men who have died in the great cause and to wondering why you should imagine you must of necessity be one of the lucky ones to escape. Flying would even take the “swank” out of the Kaiser or his booby-faced son.

For all that, however, there was one time in every flight when I held my breath—when I never quite got over being scared. That was the landing. The observation machine we had, while not so fast as some of the fighting flyers, was nevertheless capable of about one hundred miles an hour. When you are going at that pace, you swallow a lot of wind whenever you attempt to talk or rather shout. In machines of that speed, as the reader is probably informed, they begin to drop as soon as the pace goes under sixty miles an hour. That means you have to make your landing at a whooping, whizzing speed, and if you are forced to a landing away from your station and on rough ground, there will usually be bruises in the adventure for you at least. Lord bless me! But the earth would suddenly seem to be coming up at you fast—at express-train speed. Even the flyer will admit to you that it is the hardest, most nerve-racking feature of his nervous job. Just when you bring the wheels of the machine on a level with the ground there must be a swift upward turn—it is a ticklish proceeding, requiring “feel” as much as scientific knowledge of the levers, and if you don’t do the thing rightly, your plane will balk viciously, jabbing its nose into the ground, rearing, probably somersaulting, possibly smashing itself and you, too.

I soon came to have absolute confidence in my flyer, however. He was Lieut. Reggie Larkin and of my Gallipoli comrades, the Australians. He is now a youngster of not more than twenty years. But he had soon shown in training the peculiar faculties which are as much artistic and psychological as scientific, for the making of a fine flyer. He was always superbly confident of himself when he took to the air, a confidence that was contagious and of great aid to a novice like myself. And of his bravery I have a stirring account to give before this chapter closes.

As for me, after the first two or three training flights, I had not much time to think of myself. I had to make a showing in acquiring the use of the set, cinema camera with its purpose of acquiring continuous bird’s-eye views of the enemy’s positions and in mastering the use of aËrial guns and the newer problems which they presented. This included the study of plaster models of landscapes with special reference to promontories the better to judge altitudes and for gun-aiming at what lay below your sweeping aËroplane.

Now I come to my most thrilling aËrial adventure—my trip through hell in the clouds, a battle with a whirling Fokker, at that time Germany’s crack fighting plane, of gaining what we went out and up after and of the superb courage of Lieut. Reggie Larkin in guiding the machine through a tempest of attack though his face was ripped and bleeding because of shrapnel wounds.

On the line between Albert and Orvilles there was an especially vicious, strong battery. It had done deadly and ferocious work on our trenches. It was the more dangerous in that it evidently possessed a perfect camouflage of natural foliage. Several attempts that had been made to spot it had failed. One of our observation planes had been smashed by the “archeys,” and its crew killed in the attempt to discover the exact location of this battery.

On a morning when the battery had developed an especially deadly activity, Larkin and I were sent up to hunt it. We made rapidly into the air above our own sector, soon reaching an altitude of 20,000 feet. Before descending over the enemy’s territory we thought best to investigate the upper regions to see if the Boche had any of his own men up with the plan of performing their favorite method of attack at this time. This would be done by the speedy Fokkers, who would take high altitude, and hidden behind the clouds, occasionally dart forth into the clear, looking for victims. Were such discerned, the Fokker would come plunging down upon its prey, letting go everything it had in the way of gun-fire and frequently blasting the objective aËroplane into a total wreck. This is the method that the young American crack, Lufberry, has used with havoc on the Germans. He carries three guns, two that shoot through the propeller and one over his head.

If there was any pouncing of this character to be done, Larkin and I had decided that we would take a shot at the trick ourselves, but first, of course, with the consideration of escaping detection altogether if we could, for our most important task was to send back the knowledge of the location of the big, murderous battery.

The upward tendency of sound is almost as powerful as telegraphy. You can actually hear the chirping of birds at an altitude of more than 1,000 feet. But when your own motor and propeller are humming and throbbing into your ears, it is hard, if not impossible, to hear the other fellow’s.

Evidently the enemy’s observation balloons had spotted us for all our efforts at hiding behind the clouds at the dizzy altitude of 20,000 feet and had given the alarm. Suddenly a Fokker came cutting through the mist not more than fifty yards away from us. I looked to see others come soaring at us and was convinced there were probably machines below ready to trap us should we seek flight by descent as it would be likely for us to do from such a great altitude. But at any rate only our single enemy was in sight.

There wasn’t an instant wasted by either of us in maneuvering. We had come to such close quarters there wasn’t much chance. There was only one flyer in the Fokker and he let go at us with his machine guns the second he saw us. But in spite of his promptness, I appeared to have beat him to the fire. Or perhaps, it was at the very same time we got at it. How on earth such a storm of spitting bullets were sent at me without my being hit, is still a matter of wonderment to me.

His bullets did tear through one of our wings and it was turned and crippled slightly, but not enough to bring us down. Larkin maneuvered swiftly above the Fokker and I knew what for. It was a chance for me to use my bombs. I let four go at the German in as many seconds.

They did the work. We saw the Boche’s Fokker stagger, could make out the smashing of its engine in a sheet of a flame, saw the complete blowing away of one of the enemy’s wings and if the pilot himself was not blown to pieces then and there he must surely have been killed a few minutes later for the Fokker went plunging to earth like a dead thing and later when we came out of the clouds ourselves to take observations for the location of the battery, we saw the wreck of the aËroplane near an enemy trench. It was reduced to a mere heap.

I thought, right after we got the German, that our own time had come. For our aËroplane began falling with a rapidity to make you gasp for breath. It was describing the most eccentric spirals and plunging almost as dizzily as the Fokker. I yelled at Lieut. Larkin, though hopelessly, my voice sounded so small. I was dazed. Yet he told me afterward that my voice reached him. It caused him to turn his head. For the first time I saw his bloody, wounded face. I saw also that his hands had fallen away from the controls and that he was reaching out helplessly toward them.

Of course, when we came into sight out of the clouds the enemy had started all the archeys, and shrapnel from a bursting shell had torn Larkin’s face cruelly. The shock had knocked him out for a brief instant. I admit having uttered a swift, frantic prayer as I saw him reaching out so feebly to regain his controls.

But with his splendid courage, he suddenly braced. We were about 1700 feet above the enemy lines when he again succeeded taking direction of the machine. To have tried to climb directly up again in the enemy fire must have meant our destruction. We would have been too fair a target. Instead, Larkin boldly shot straight downward directly toward the aËrial batteries and the trenches. They thought us hit and falling and fled from their places in fear of being caught in the crash.

Larkin shot his plane not fifty feet above the Boche trenches, but none of them took even so much as a rifle shot at us. They either ran or cowered in the trenches as we swept past. Then he shot up again, cleared a small, wooded section of knolls and dropped behind them, thus successfully getting out of the range of the archeys.

Larkin turned once again to me his blood-reddened countenance. This time he grinned bravely, coolly.

“It’s quite all right, Dave,” he called. “The wounds are nothing. I’m feeling quite fit again. We’ve got to spot that battery.”

So up we went. We mounted some 15,000 feet. The archeys promptly and furiously got after us again. They spread a circular fire about us. That is the way the archeys go after aËroplanes, not shooting directly at them but trying to surround them with a fire that must smash them whichever direction they may take in seeking to escape destruction.

Meanwhile, I was working my camera for all it was worth and peering upon and around the country with my glasses. There were several small clutters of heavily wooded knolls marking the landscape below us and the rattle and roar of the archeys were suddenly joined by the crash and boom of bigger guns and the distant reply of our own batteries.

I began banging my wireless exultantly. For down in the largest clutter of knolls, under a cloak of foliage so naturally dense and perhaps artificially assisted and affording full concealment ordinarily, I had seen that instant sudden sparks or flares as emitted from the throats of the big batteries’ guns in action.

Additionally, I dropped red lights visible in the daylight, over the battery’s position, which was hardly necessary, for my wireless was working perfectly and I soon was giving them the enemy’s range.

But the first fire from our side was poor and I was therefore excited and indignant.

“What the devil’s the matter with you?” I wirelessed, repeating the instructions. “If you can’t do better than that, I’ll have to get the infantry to teach you how to shoot!”

I chuckled to think how the artillerymen would like that.

It was enough to make them try a shot at us.

But a minute later a shell ripped right through the trees that camouflaged the battery, tearing a big gash in the concealment.

“Bull’s eye!” I shot out into the air from my key. “Give’m hell!”

With that Larkin started us for home with the archeys spitting their rage but ineffectually.

But just the same something did happen that made all a blackness for me until I woke up in a clearing-station hospital just behind our lines.

Brave, old Larkin was the cause. He had held his nerve and strength and never did he falter until we were home and within twenty feet of the ground when he suddenly lurched forward and was “out.” We crashed to the ground and I also was “out.”

There wasn’t much the matter with me. I was only pea green from bruises for a week. But Larkin, poor chap, had two ribs and a leg broken in addition to having suffered the shrapnel wounds on his face.