High Adventure

ines, an event in the life of an airman which calls for a celebration of some sort. Therefore, having been granted leave for the afternoon, the two of us came into the old French to

ed, women and children killed and maimed. With a full moon to guide them, they would be sure to return to-night. "Ah, cette guerre! Quand sera-t-elle finie?" He offered us a refuge until our train should leave. Usually

s we walked down the silent street. "I wanted to say, 'Monsieur, I have just finished my fi

late arrivals, were prowling about in the shadow of the houses, searching for food and a warm kitchen

s faim, nom de Dieu! Est-ce-qu

t of phanto

in the lone

in the quiet o

e from the w

the pavement. We were curious, no doubt. At any rate, we looked in. A woman was sitting on a cot bed with her arms around two little children. They were snuggled up against her and both fast asleep; but she was sitting very erect, in a stra

no bomb-dropping to do, and there are but few women and children living in the territory over which we fly. One hundred hours is not a great while as time is measured on the ground

remember coming down from my first air battle and the breathless account I gave of it at the bureau, breathless and vague. Lieutenant Talbott listened quietly, making out the compte rendu as I talked

there was to see. They reported the numbers of the enemy planes encountered, the types, where seen and when. They spotted batteries, trains in stations back of the enemy lines, gave the hour precisely, reported any activity on the roads. In moments of exasperation Drew would say, "I think they are stringing us! This is all a put-up job!" Certainly this did app

traveling private secretary. I'll do t

the numbers of the enemy, estimate their approximate altitude,-all this when the air was criss-crossed with streamers of smoke from machine-gun tracer bullets, and opposing aircraft

ember that what was happening there was only of secondary concern to us. Often we became absorbed in watching what was taking place below us, to the exclusion of any thought of aerial activity, our chances for attack or of b

from the lowest artillery réglage machines at a few hundreds of metres, to the highest avions de chasse at six thousand meters and above. Réglage, photographic, and reconnaissance planes have their particula

tter. "It was pure accident," he told me afterward. He had gone from Rheims to the Argonne forest without meeting a single German. "And I didn't want to meet one; for it was Thanksgiving Day. It has associati

ver and thro

ther's hou

ain and passed over Rheims, going northeast. Then he saw the Albatross; "and if you had been standing on one of the towers of the cathedral you would ha

fire, and then, as it happened, i

trol, Drew following him down until h

even, to make a conservative estimate, we fight inconclusive battles because of faulty mach

it, because he did not know exactly the hour when the combat occurred. His watch was broken and he had neglected asking for another before starting. He judged the time of the attack, approximately, as two-thirty, and the infant

by Lieutenant Nungesser, the Roi des Aces, and by other French and American pilots. There is no petty jealousy among airmen, and in our group the esp

hin the French lines. Drew knew what it meant to be wounded and falling out of control. But his Spad held together. He ha

eeling deeply sorry for ourselves, and for all airmen of whatever nationality, whose lives were to be snuffed out in their promising beginnings. I used to play "The Minstrel Boy to th

the wide f

ith him my

I shall me

ike sheep, mov

ss meadows

ool shadows

endezvous

noon of whit

thing is that his prophecy came so very near being true. He had the first draft of the poem in his breast-pocket when wounded, and has kept t

ood common to all young soldiers? Drew was just as sincere in writing his verses, and I put all the feeling I could into my tin-whistle interpreta

d the disposal of our personal effects in case of death. Then we would climb into our machines thinking, "This may be our last sortie. We may be dead in an hour, in half an hour, in twenty minutes." We planned splendidly spectacular ways in wh

f the German anti-aircraft gunners. It would be far-fetched to say that any airman ever looks forward zestfully to the business of being shot at with one hundred and fives; and seventy-fives, if they are well placed, are unpleasant enough. After one hundred hour

well enough what the gunners are doing. We know exactly where some of the batteries are, and the approximate location of all of them along the sector; and we know, from earlier experience, when we come within range of each individual battery. Presently one of them begins firing in bursts of four shells. If their first estimate of our range has been an accurate one, if

thinking of the cost to Germany, at one hundred francs a shot, of all this futile shelling. Drew, in particular, loves this cost-accounting business, and I must admit that much pleasure may be had in it, after patrol. They rarely fire less than fifty shells at us during

e never lose the sport of searching for them. Only a few days ago we located one of this kind which came into action in the open by the side of a road. First we saw the flashes and then the shell-bursts in the same cade

again on the Champagne front. We have a wholesome respect for one battery here, a respect it has justly earned by shooting which is really remarkable. We talk of this battery, which is east of Rheims and not far distant from Nogent l'Abbesse, and take prof

we have been lifted by the concussions and set down violently again at the bottom of the vacuum; and this on a clear day when a chasse machine is almost invisible at that height, and despite its speed of two hundred kilometres an hour. On a gray day, when we are flying

d ahead, and the area back of the first lines there is a wide one, crossed by many intersecting lines of trenches) he got well over them and chose a field as level as a billiard table for landing-ground. In the very center of it, however, there was one post, a small worm-eaten thing, of the color of the dead grass around it. He hit it, just

ly confiscated for firewood by some poi