Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 231, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 September 1916 — DARING DEEDS PERFORMED DY KNIGHTS OF AIR [ARTICLE]

DARING DEEDS PERFORMED DY KNIGHTS OF AIR

Feats of British Aviators in Somme Campaign Related by Correspondent. GREAT HELP TO ARTILLERY Ringed by White Puff Clouds of Exploding Shells. Direct Deadly Fire Upon Foe—Many Musicians Among Pilots.

London. —Mr. Philip Gibbs, a s correspondent with the British armies in the field, sends to the Daily Chronicle an interesting article dealing with the British supremacy in the air and Its vital relation to the operations of the Somme. He writes: “All through the battle of Picardy most hf us have kept glancing up into the sky across the enemy’s lines from day to day and looking for a Prussian aeroplane. It is a rare bird. “Now and again when our flying men are not out because the clouds are lying low and it is a ‘dud day,’ as they call It, a hostile machine sneaks through the mist and drops a few bombs and goes full speed back again; and more often, but not very often, a flight of Prussians will come in a gang through a clear sky and attack one or more of our scouts if they can be sure of having all the odds in their favor. Behind their own lines they are more bold (and there Is nothing wrong with their courage as individual fighters), and lie in wait in the crossroads of the air like modern Black Knights (with the Iron Cross as their badge) to defend their territory from all intruders —not, however, with any great success—and to provide exciting combats for our own knights errant. But across our lines they venture rarely. “During the first week of the battle, which began on July 1, the hostile machines were invisible, and yet during all this time of fighting we cannot-go-up to the lines without seeing our own aeroplanes flying above the shell fire in Prussian territory. Ringed by White Puff Clouds. “The ‘Archies’ are firing at them, ringing them round with white puff clouds, which burst very close, so close that ope holds one’s breath or speaks ft whisper—‘They’ve got him !’—until a second later one can see the aeroplane skimming onward steadily and quite careless of these explosions which follow on the trail of his wings. Below these flying men of ours shells are crashing and smoke is vomiting up, and villages are burning, and there is all the tumult of battle, but they circle round gs aloof as the winged gods themselves, It seems, from all this earthly strife —yet not aloof, because they help to direct the thunderbolts, as some of the old gods did. “So far from prowling o,n our side of the lines, these pilots and observers make a dally habit of going for far journeys into the enemy’s zone, often as far as Bapaume, which is a dozen miles beyond our own trenches, and to places llke.Martinpuich and CourceTette and Flers. A few days ago they set Martinpuich on fire, and it was still burning when they flew over It again next day. “On July 28 four of our aeroplanes paid a surprise call on Mons, the scene of our earliest fighting two years ago, and, reminded the enemy of oar ‘contemptible little army’ of those days by flying low and dropping bombs on the rolling stock in the railway station and upon sheds full of munitions. They were leisurely In their clrclings, and stayed until fires had exploded at ! four “different points and much ammunition had been blown up. Then they came home to dinner. “Every day and all day long they ate out and about, across the Prussian lines, observing for our artillery and directing the fire of our guns upon the enemy’s batteries and other targets which they save seen below with their

hawk’s eyes. This work, so audaciously and skillfully done, has given us an undoubted mastery of observation, which the enemy no longer holds. The Prussian gunners now have to shoot, mostly, by the map, and although they are very wise in science, it is not the same thing as being able to direct their fire by direct observation of results. Our airmen have been of vast service in the daily battle of guns, and it is largely due to their flights that our artillery has been able to destroy many of the enemy’s batteries. “One day seven batteries reported active by one machine were all silenced in ten minutes and direct hits were made on five or more batteries. “On July 28 one of our air squadrons controlled nine direct hits on the enemy's batteries. “Those things tell. The knocking out of an opposing battery means less er certainty of progress. It is the hardest blow that can be given, for this is a battle of guns, and every battery destroyed is better than the taking of a trench, or at least the easiest way to take it. “A machine of ours ranged howitzers on a battery of two 5.9 howitzers, which were destroyed, and another machine directed guns on another battery, destroying one emplacement and causing explosions which lasted an hour. “So the record runs from day to day, and the enemy is getting frightened for his guns and withdrawing some of them at least to safer places. “The fearlessness of our men is not a virtue with them. It is a natural instinct. They attack unequal odds with the gusto of schoolboys who fling themselves into a football scrimmage. “Literally, the enemy is put to flight by these modern men of ours, as when the other day one of our pilots dived at five hostile machines attacking one of our scouts and drove them off; and as when, a day or two ago, two others attacked four Fokkers —‘the deadly Fokker,’ as it used to be called —and drove them down into their own lines. “They are a new type of men, these pilots and observers of the Royal Flying corps. It is difficult to place them or to account for them. They seem to have been born to fly. For the most part they are very young men —boys of nineteen or twenty —though older men, twice their ago and more, are found here and there, having come out of professions like the law and the civil service and taken to the air like ducks to water, but surprised with themselves. The younger men are clean cut, fine and delicately made fellows, as far as I know them, rather highly strung and nervous in temperament. “Flight the Music of Life. 1 * “It is quite curious that many of them are great musical talent. In onejsquadron I know there are nearly 20 men who are all very full of musical talent. One of them, a stripling, came out of the trenches to volunteer as an airman, with long screeds of music which he had written down ‘out of his head,’ as children say, without hearing a note of it played until he came back. At night, when dusk creeps through the sky, and one by one the homing birds fly down (there is always an anxious question about the squadron commander, who is the best beloved), the flyihg men settle round the piano in the aerodrome, and one of them brings out his violin and plays it with a master touch, and another sings in a bass voice that may be heard one day at Covent Garden, and through the evening the men take turns at the piano, to play what comes into their heads and out of their hearts, “This link between music and flight may be a coincidence In the case of one squadron (though I have heard of it elsewhere)', but it may be that flight is the new music of life, and that the imagination of the younger generation is soaring upon real wings, inspired by flight to the deep chords of emotion that in earlier days went into sound and color. The pity Is that just now they are instruments of death. “They have amazing adventures up there in the sky and learn strange things. They learn the look of the &reat country below, so that every landmark is familiar to them, and any strange flash or shape at once, and those things they must learn in three different scales of light, morning, afternoon and evening, because at each of those times the landscape and

the shape and shadows of it are quite different. “They fly above the bursting shells and the tumult of war, but hear nothing of It unless they come down very low, for the humming of their engine is a great song in their ears. “But they hear the ‘Archies,’ which make the puff clouds above them, and sometimes, but not often,’ the scream of great going by them. A friend of mine Iphl a queer and frightful case of this not long ago. “He was flying fairly low when he saw coming straight for him threequarters of a ton of metal, v in the shape of a shell, and heard its whining note and was tossed as though in a rough sea by the rush of the wind it made. It was a shell from one of our 15-inch Grannies, and this pilot who met it on its way within 100 yards was annoyed for the moment with the gunners below, who had not worried about the bird in the sky, which was my friend. “They are humorous, keen, sensitive men, these air pilots of ours, and though some of them are very musical they do not disdain other joys of life, like a dinner in some good dining place behind the lines when a ‘dud day’ makes flying ‘off.’ And for some of us not of the air it is better than a banquet to see these flying men and to hear them building castles in the air and telling tales more wonderful than those of fairy lore.”