There was no high tribunal on the Toul front in the early summer of ‘18 to pass judgment on whether or not you had the stuff to stick in combat work. You had one chance, just one, to make good and bang! as fast as that it was over. If you stood the test you had long hours, a wracking grind and perhaps a hero’s death to look forward to; if you failed you went back. It mattered not how swell a guy you were nor whom you knew at G.H.Q.—back you went.
Quite a few were going back in those days. They lacked some sort of spark or callousness, something was missing. Few had the inclination, nobody the time, to help them discover what it was.
Up in Flanders the harassed Haig had just issued his desperate “backs to the wall” order; from Arras to Luneville the Boche were raising hell and out on the Somme somebody had pot-shotted Richtofen and his triplane into immortality. Thus inspired, the Allies banged into the air with every crate they could muster—the Baron was gone—recklessly determined to drive Jerry out of the sky... and at the Toul airdrome General Gerard and Billy Mitchell were hanging the green and red ribbon of the Croix de Guerre on Peterson, Meissner and a promising young lieutenant named Rickenbacker...
Those cherished bits of bronze were the rewards of experience. Without that you couldn’t hope to do much; and yet the attitude of the fighting pilots was strange, for they expected the green men coming up to have it. When you reported for duty you were expected to have had at least fifty hours on combat, or that was what you felt. Where did they expect you to get it? At birth? Out of a bottle of vin rouge? Where else? Certainly you couldn’t get it at ground school. They gave you, Heaven knows, everything else—the works, then they transferred the responsibility of your soul to God and shoved you off to the front.
And you came along, eyes sparkling, chin high, your boots drumming defiantly on the Rue Royale as you stopped over in Paris for what you were certain was the final look-see; your brain hummed a fierce litany to the memories of Guenemer and Chapman and Nimmie Prince and other stout souls who had gone west; and you clicked your jaws together and jumped off on the final lap swearing to show those dirty Huns a thing or two about air fighting.
Youth! High spirited, striding along the skies seeking a place to die! Never realizing, never caring much either, that experience was so vital.
Such a chap was Big George Dorman. He was tall and gangling and rawboned; he came from Texas where all horses buck and all men shoot. Now for fourteen months he had dreamed of nothing but air warfare. And he came equipped too, as well as any man could. When he rode the ‘cognac special’ out of Issoudon for combat duty he had a thorough knowledge of gunnery, meteorology; he knew the vagaries of Spads, Camels and Nieuports—knew them backwards and forwards and down through the middle. He backed this knowledge with as sturdy a heart as ever any crusader of any age knew.
For a warrior so well accoutered it naturally would be presumed success was inevitable. But it wasn’t.
Dorman had failed.
Odd how a chap who lives so intensely for his first taste of actual war, who has run over it in theory a hundred times and more, odd how a chap that keen for service jams himself at the first opportunity.
Odd, too, that he should have at once been transferred back to Orly and made a ferryman, for there were scores up there; weary, tired men and men who simply had a bellyful of war—scores of them who would have welcomed such a change. But ferrying... gad, sirs, there was a job for you! Running tested ships up to the advanced airport and taking the crippled back to base. A job for an old man it was.
And yet here he was, Dorman, the big Texan who had come the four thousand miles from the Rio Grande to the Moselle to scrap the Huns—here he was riding the cockpit of a camber-splintered Nieuport 23 back to Orly while a hundred kilometers north...
Passing over Chaumont at five hundred meters he looked down on the great rectangular chateau that was Pershing’s headquarters; and he visualized himself putting the bus down nearby and marching smack into the General’s office and demanding action. He could almost see the surprise on Pershing’s face.
“General, sir,” he’d say; “I’m Lieutenant Dorman, late of Pursuit Group, one of the Ninety-Fourth. The first time in battle I funked and was sent back. Now I’d like to return.”
General Pershing would (or would he?) put on his professional visage and say: “How’d it happen, Lieutenant?”
Well, no matter what the General would say, or wouldn’t say, he’d get the story right there and then, truthfully, unembellished and with nothing overlooked. He might be offended, he might be amused and then there was a chance that he’d have some attaché throw the lieutenant out on an ear, but the story he would hear.
Two days (Dorman would begin) he’d been up when it happened. May nineteen was the date; dull, gray and misty. Atrocious flying weather but just the sort of weather you’d find around Toul in the early summer of ‘18. It looked like a day of no patrols, no work except for the alerts; a day when you could get together in the cubicles over several bottles and rub elbows with Campbell and Winslow and Lufbrey and listen to the masters. Oh, a green youngster could have done worse than draw this outfit!
But along about noon the mist blew itself on up towards St. Mihiel and the clouds lifted. The sky cleared and good visibility was restored. Dorman remembered Luf winking a shrewd eye at Campbell and saying:
“Well, Doug, it looks like work outside now.”
And Campbell, delightfully intimate with the biggest name in A.E.F. flying, laughed and said: “Sure, somebody has to work to make up for all you gold-bricks.”
Only Campbell was kidding. Of course, Luf wasn’t really gold-bricking. He was down with a pretty high temperature, he was stretched out on his bunk. The bunk, if nothing else, proved his greatness for it wasn’t a plank-bottomed, uncomfortable bunk over which you dropped a mattress and were content. No. Luf’s bunk was made out of the rubber shock-absorbed wrappings off defective undercarriages—and gentlemen that was luxury then.
Luf had his boots off, his blouse was unbuttoned and his Sam Browne belt was unhooked. He didn’t look like the fellow whose name was in all the headlines back home. His hands were clasped behind his neck, his little mustache wiggled fraternally as he smiled... Luf was forever smiling in a sort of futility, as if he sensed the finish.
Across his blouse were six ribbons in a double row, and one of them was unclasped and sticking out at right angle. Dorman remembered that; he was sitting on an empty five-gallon wine keg marveling at the indifference of the men who come to grips with death and for whom each moment may be the last. That ribbon, for example. Solid blue bar, it was; with thin red and white pipings at the ends. The D.S.C. And there it was about to fall to the ground. A lot Luf seemed to care.
Laughter and talk and jokes...
Silly sort of war, Dorman reflected. Damned silly. Like a play. Here gathered the great and the near-great to laugh and talk in raucous tones of women and leaves and leaves and women... and sometimes, (not often) of the narrow squeaks they’d had. Luf told them of what a hell of a show it was that day up at Rancourt, on the Peronne-Bapaume highway, when C-3, which was Guynemer’s outfit, got in a mess and had to be helped out by Bert Hall, Pavelka, him and a couple of others out of the Lafayette.
“A great scrap,” Luf had said. And then he had looked up at the little roof and went on. “I wonder if our kids’ll read about it fifty years from now?”
And then he had laughed.
Indifferent. Hard. Cold-steel. Dorman wondered if this were necessary to greatness.
Then all of a sudden the sun popped out and drove a vermillion shaft through the window.
Everybody shouted. They knew what that meant.
“There it is! Up and at ‘em in a minute, lads!”
Correct. With the scattering of the mists there was hunting to be done and in an hour the group was off in echelon formation. They took three new replacements over with them, just three. Too many new hands on one sortie limited the poaching and made the responsibility too great.
Dorman stood at the tarmac and watched the flat-winged birds drive their way over the Woevre, his heart pumping torrents of blood against his temples and his palms wet with sweat. He felt that he was pretty close to something.
He stared into the sky, his thoughts off in the blue, unaware of anyone within a thousand miles. Then, suddenly, he looked around and there was Saufley, the little sergeant, first class, who could spot motor trouble before the landing gear was on the ground.
“What?” asked Dorman, for he was dimly conscious that Saufley had said something.
Saufley grinned. And when he spoke you knew he had done duty with the British.
“Bloody fine hunting they’ll have,” he said, looking up at the specks. Sergeants, first class with combat units, had a queer way of feeling when new replacements needed information. “J-2’s across the line.”
“Oh,” Dorman said. He didn’t know exactly what J-2 was. Saufley knew it.
“The Fifth group of the Fifth German army,” he went on, kicking the dirt with his toe, as if to say he didn’t envy the Ninety-Fourth’s men. “The best, now that the bloody Baron has gone, I guess.”
Dorman, however, was not awed. He said with elaborate contempt, “The bigger they are the harder they fall.”
Saufley looked at him and grinned.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Dorman said. He drifted his eyes inside the hangar and saw three trim Spads in the shadows. “Those guys can’t match Spads.”
“Don’t kid yourself,” Saufley said. “That kind of thinking’ll get you hurt. Never done combat, have you?”
Dorman shook his head.
“I’m going over this afternoon,” he said. He went on, “but I think I can handle myself all right.”
“Sure, you can. But don’t ever forget the other guy is pretty good or he wouldn’t be up there. Lissen, I ain’t one of these smart alecs who think it’s clever to buddy around with the officers. But I wanna tell you not to underestimate the Boche. Them Germans ain’t dummies.” He shook his head and added, as if to himself, “Not by a damn sight.”
“I know it,” Dorman said, “just the same I’m anxious to get over with eight-one-nine.”
“Good bus,” Saufley said. “She’s only had twenty hours and got the original linen on ‘er. But the left gun is sorta temperamental.” He started off inside the hangar and Dorman followed him.
A battle plane was life to Dorman, a bridge by which the distance to Elysian fields could be spanned, and he touched his Spad as if it were a living thing which could understand his fingertips. Once or twice he was stricken by self-consciousness as Saufley looked at him swiftly. Dorman was suddenly aware, for no reason, that he should be more dispassionate. After all, it was a war.
For an hour then he milled around the great drab hangar, frankly alive; cognizant that out there was fighting. It seemed different somehow, for back in school this was what they all lived for. Up here it was more serious; there was less laughter and derision of the enemy. Back in the school the Huns were a lot of stumblebums who didn’t know what it was all about, but up here the men who had been over and met them knew differently. They were highly prized as foemen.
Then it happened. So swiftly, so suddenly Dorman was never able to get it straight.
There was a deep drone from up above and he first thought the group was coming back. But there was confusion in the hangar, for the mechanics had recognized the hum of the motor.
“Jerry!” they shouted, and got out into the open immediately. They thought bombers were in the air.
Dorman dashed for the door and looked up. There they were, a scant three hundred meters up, daring the Archies—two Fokkers, in a dive with their Spandaus spitting. The Maltese crosses glared ominously; it was the first time he had ever seen the enemy in full flight.
And then it dawned on him that they were far back behind the Allied lines; and the blood surged again.
This was his chance and he knew it.
“Hey!” he shouted at Saufley. “Hey!”
Saufley turned around and looked.
“What the hell?” he cried.
Dorman cupped his hands.
“Gimme a hand! I’m going up!”
Saufley turned his eyes upward. One of the Fokkers had been scared away by Archie fire. It was breaking all around him and he had turned and was thundering back. But the other was coming through a literal wall of steel. Saufley ran back over to the hangar.
Dorman grabbed him. He was excited.
“Roll out eight-one-nine! Load up those guns!”
“Lissen, Lieutenant,” Saufley said. “You better—”
“Beat it!” Dorman said. He slanted his head upward and saw the Boche strafing the road that led to Toul. The enemy was having a great time. Dorman raced over to the cubicle and dashed inside. He grabbed his helmet and his flying coat and was putting them on as he came out. Lufbery was at the side of the house, staring interestedly at the proceedings.
“Where the hell you think you’re going?” he yelled.
“To teach Jerry a lesson,” Dorman flung over his shoulder.
“Wait a minute—”
But Dorman was across the field The mechanics had rolled out his Spad. He jumped and caught his foot in the stirrup, crying to Saufley: “All set?”
“Yes, sir,” Saufley shouted. He was infected with some of the enthusiasm of the tall Texan.
Dorman swung down in the seat and a mechanic grasped the prop.
“Coupez!”
“Coupez!”
The mechanic centered the blade.
“Contact!”
“Contact!”
He adjusted his goggles and put on his gloves. He reached out with his hands and touched the feed blocks on his guns. They were loaded. His gasoline line cocks were turned right; there was his signal pistol and four cartridges. In his box were pencil, paper, some cigarettes, a flash and two bars of chocolate.
His feet were on the rudder bar; his hand raced along to the throttle. The motor spluttered and caught, he jiggled the lever and eased it open. Dust and pebbles threw up the backwash and bounced against the stabilizers.
Saufley twisted his shoulder and head to brace himself and protect his eyes from the slipstream and came running around to the cockpit.
“Has the lieutenant any papers on his person that would be of value to the enemy?” he yelled.
Dorman shook his head. He pulled his throttle shut, then opened it and waddled out. He got his windage and had a final look around; there was the Fokker just about over headquarters of the General commanding the Air Service. It looked as if he were in a dive, tiny puffs jumped from the Spandaus as he sprayed the roof with lead.
Dorman kicked his ship around and gunned it; and it got away in a flutter of wings. He slipped wide around the hangar and went after the Boche.
His finger slipped up onto the trigger and he squeezed it. He saw the crank arms jumping and could dimly hear the rattle of his guns. Well, thank God, they were all right. He settled down a little more so he could get his eyes on a level with the ring sights. Now. This was something like. Would this be a thrill for the lads back on the ranch or not?