She led him into the room, and there, sitting up in bed, staring at them was Lieutenant Thaw.
“Well, it’s you again, Nursie. I think it’s about time I had another bath.”
A slight touch of crimson colored the nurse’s cheeks, and she shook her head, saying firmly, “One bath is all you get, I’m afraid. But if you want another, here’s your new nurse.”
Thaw grinned beneath his bushy mustache. “Well, that’s a fine kettle of fish! Good things don’t last very long, do they? When do I get out of here, Nursie?”
“In two days, if you behave yourself. Now, I’ve got work to do.”
When she left the room, Thaw turned to Gavin. “What’s your name again? I’m a little fuzzy about what happened.”
“My name’s Gavin Stuart, Lieutenant.”
“Well, Gavin, I owe you my life, so I guess I’m going to let you take care of me to make sure you did a good job. Here, why don’t you sit down and tell me all about yourself. What are you doing over here, anyway, all the way from America?”
Gavin sat down and began to answer Thaw’s questions. Soon Gavin found he had told the aviator more than he’d intended to.
“So,” Thaw said with interest in his dark eyes, “you say you came over to fly airplanes, but you haven’t done any flying. Is that right?”
Gavin nodded sadly. “Well, that’s about it. I’ve tried everything I can think of.”
Thaw winked at him. “No, not everything. You haven’t tried Bill Thaw yet. How about giving me a shot at it?”
“You mean…I…you could get me into the Air Force?”
“I can do better than that,” Thaw grinned. “Have you ever heard of the Lafayette Escadrille?”
Gavin shook his head. “I know an ‘escadrille’ is a name for a French flying unit, but I never heard of the ‘Lafayette Escadrille’.”
“Well, you’re going to be happy to hear it now. The Lafayette Escadrille,” he said, “is a new unit composed entirely of Americans. There aren’t many of us yet, but our numbers are growing all the time.”
“Americans? I didn’t know there were that many Americans over here.”
“Quite a few of them joined the Legion like you did. Others who could fly got into the regular Flying Corps. A man called Bill Prince put together the Escadrille. He got some bigwigs back in the States interested, but the French wouldn’t listen to him at first. They were too afraid of spies to let any Americans into their forces. But Prince kept at it. And now, as of March 14, 1916, the Lafayette Escadrille has become an official unit of the French Flying Service.”
“Do you really think I could get in?” Gavin demanded, his eyes bright. “I wouldn’t want to mislead you, Lieutenant. I’m not a very good flyer.”
Thaw laughed. “None of us were when we started. But we’re going to have a fine training program, and we’ve got some good men. Of course,” he said, shrugging his burly shoulders, “a man learns best by watching what the good flyers do and trying to imitate them. But I figure I owe you a few lessons, so when you get me out of this place, we’ll see what we can do.”
For the next two days, Gavin hardly moved from Bill Thaw’s side. Consequently, he got well acquainted with Nurse Heather Spencer, who, he found out, was not a regular nurse but a volunteer who had come over from England to help care for the wounded. She had told him this about herself over a cup of tea when he caught her between rounds.
“I came over to serve God, Private Stuart,” she said simply. “I could’ve gone as a mission volunteer to Africa, where some of my friends went, but I found that I have just as good an opportunity to share the gospel here as over in the Dark Continent.”
Gavin was dumbfounded. He’d had the notion that all missionaries and most Christians, for that matter, were dour-faced and determined to put an end to all fun wherever they found it. “Well, my brother’s a preacher,” he said blankly. “An evangelist over in the States. But I guess it hasn’t rubbed off on me yet. I don’t have any more religion than our horse back home.”
Heather Spencer was an astute young woman. Already she had learned that she could not force men to believe in God, and she wasn’t about to begin now. She simply said, “The time will come, Private Stuart, when you will know God. Every man has that time, I think.” She put her hand on her cheek, bracing her elbow on the table. “I think God is on some sort of manhunt…or womanhunt. He wants everybody to know his love, so he sends hundreds out to find them. His scouts are chasing after us, and every one of us has some sort of bloodhound hot on his trail. Sooner or later he will find us.”
Gavin was entranced. He shook his head in wonder. “I never heard anything like that before. What would God want with a guy like me?”
The nurse said gently, “He wants us all, every one of us. From the savage in Africa to the Eskimo eating frozen blubber to the King and Queen in Buckingham Palace, God loves us, one and all.”
The conversation was then abruptly broken off by the arrival of others, but Gavin never forgot what she said. It burned through his head, and he repeated it to Thaw.
The pilot was now able to sit in a chair. A burly brute with a splendid physique, he had thick black hair, and snapping black eyes. His flowing mustachios were the pride of his heart. “Better watch out for that kind,” he said. “They mean marriage.”
On the third day the pair prepared to leave the hospital. Thaw was on crutches but able to maneuver fairly well. As they left the hospital, Gavin spotted the blond nurse and said, “Excuse me, Lieutenant. I’ll go say good-bye to Nurse Spencer.” He ran over quickly and pulled off his hat, cradling it in his hands. “We’re leaving now. I want to thank you for all the kindness you’ve shown to the Lieutenant…and to me, too.”
Heather put out her hand and took his in a surprisingly firm grip. “I’ll remember you in my prayers,” she said. “You, and the lieutenant as well.” She smiled and added, “Come back and see me if you’re ever in Paris again. We can talk.”
“I’ll…I’ll do that, miss,” Gavin said and backed away awkwardly, turning with a wide grin for Lieutenant Thaw.
As the two got into the cab that was to take them back to their unit, Thaw said, “That’s a good-lookin’ woman. But she’s too religious for me. She wouldn’t even let a fella chew tobacco, would she?”
Gavin quickly changed the subject. “Well, I guess we’ll be parting company, Lieutenant. It’s back to the trenches for me.”
A delighted grin crossed Thaw’s lips beneath the black mustache. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a paper. “Nope. That’s where you’re wrong. You’re going to be a pilot in the Lafayette Escadrille.” He handed the paper to Gavin, who read it, his eyes almost bugging out as he learned that he was now assigned to the Lafayette Escadrille and was to report for active duty immediately.
Gavin, like most of the Stuart clan, was not one to show his emotions much. But he had to blink the tears back as he stared at the paper, not daring to look up. “Lieutenant Thaw, I’ll never forget this,” he said when he could manage to speak, “Never!”
Thaw glanced at the boy and frowned. “Not sure you ought to thank me, Gavin. The losses are going to be terrible. The Germans have the best planes and more of them. Until we catch up, we’re like clay pigeons up there.”
“I’ll never forget it,” Gavin repeated. Then he looked up and smiled. “That nurse said one time that God does strange things to people. She told me that. And now I sort of believe it, from the way things are working out.”
Without further conversation, they rattled along over the rough streets of Paris, out into the countryside. As they headed toward the Lafayette Escadrille Air Station, Gavin was thinking, This is what I came for…to fly. This is what it’s all about. Then he added a little prayer. God, if you are there, thank you…thank you a lot.
With a carefree heart, Gavin Stuart drew on black leather pants, jacket, goggles, gloves, and crash helmet. He discovered that from the moment he first slung his leg over the edge of a cockpit and a
gold-braided, high-ranking brass hat clapped him on the back, saying, “Mon enfant, you are a pilot!”, he never had anyone with him. There was no dual control in the ships. He was strictly on his own.
Of course, there were instructors—the older pilots. Bill Thaw, especially, kept his eyes on Gavin throughout the first days and weeks. Nothing seemed to escape him, and by easy stages, Gavin absorbed enough fundamentals to keep from killing himself.
The school at Buc, near Versailles, was a training center for pilots who would eventually go into pursuit squadrons. If a man didn’t make a good showing, he was eliminated and sent back to his regiment or to some other duty. But nearly everyone who got to Buc finished with honors. Of the sixteen candidates in Gavin’s class, fifteen got their brevets.
The training was no bed of roses, Gavin learned. He was shaken out of sleep at dawn every morning with only a cup of lukewarm chicory, masquerading as coffee, to sustain him until the first meal at eleven o’clock. Then the class members went out, shivering, to one of the fields, each awaiting his turn on the wonderful and fearful contraption known as the Blériot model plane.
The Blériot was a source of never-ceasing wonder. It seemed to be constructed of odds and ends of wood, discarded matchsticks, and the like, which were wired together in catch-as-catch-can fashion with baling wire to form the fuselage. Old handkerchiefs were sewn together to cover the rings in the part of the fuselage around the pilot’s seat. The remainder of the fuselage was left naked, which gave the ship a kind of half-finished appearance.
When Gavin asked why they weren’t covered, Thaw shrugged. “Easier to replace than brace wires when they get hit by a bullet or when they get a little strain on them.”
To make things more complicated, the planes’ engines were not identical and ranged from a three-cylinder Anzani Italian radio motor to the sixty-horsepower LeRhone rotary motor.
In addition, the stick in the Blériot had an odd feature—a triangular-shaped grip on top with a contact button on one side so the motor could be blipped on and off. Instead of grasping the stick like a broom handle, the pilot curled his fingers around the top bar of the triangle. There were no ailerons; the wings, owing to their light construction, warped quite easily. It was an out-moded system, of course, for the Wright brothers’ first plane had used this system.
On that first flight, Gavin found himself sitting with half his body projecting above the fuselage giving no protection against the full blast of the propeller stream. The whirling stick was only a couple of feet in front of his nose.
He took off, rising about ten or twenty feet, then blipped the motor on and off, bringing the ship down almost flat, hardly peaking at all. Again and again he repeated the procedure, his landings improving gradually.
But by the end of the day’s training, partially wrecked Blériots lay all over the field. Bad landings that even the tough little Blériot wouldn’t take, motor failures in very embarrassing spots, and the general uncertainty of the new pilots themselves spread the little ships all over the surrounding landscape.
“You know,” Gavin once said to Thaw, “it’s a wonder we don’t have more broken backs after all these crack-ups.”
Thaw glanced around the field and nodded. “I’ve thought about that myself. Look there, those planes themselves dissolved in splinters—simply disintegrated—but most of us just get out of the wreckage and walk away. We’re tougher than that airplane, I guess.”
For two weeks, the Americans were drilled daily in the techniques of flying at the front. And in their off hours, the older pilots spent much time discussing an important problem—the choice of an official insignia to designate their squadron. Dozens of different ideas were proposed. They finally settled on the painting of the head of an American Indian wearing a war bonnet of red, white, and blue feathers.
Almost as soon as that decision was made, Captain Thenault announced that the squadron would make its first patrol over the German lines on May 14. Takeoff was scheduled for six o’clock in the morning.
At dawn, Gavin climbed into his own sleek new plane, a speedy little Nieuport single-seater pursuit ship, powered by a ninety-horsepower LeRhone rotary motor and equipped with a single forty-seven-shot Lewis machine gun mounted on the top wing. The synchronized gun that fired through the propeller had not made its appearance on the Allied side to any great extent. But the Nieuports were the last word in speed and maneuverability, with a ground speed in excess of one hundred miles per hour.
Gavin’s hands were trembling when he took off from the airfield as dawn flooded the runway, and he stayed carefully on Bill Thaw’s left wing. Thaw had said just before takeoff, “We won’t do any shooting today. Just watch.”
They cleared the ground easily, nosed up before leveling off, and soon were heading over the moon-like surface of no-man’s-land. It did look like the moon—still, blasted craters—but Gavin had no time for sightseeing. He was attempting to stay as close as possible to Bill Thaw—right on his tail. They flew a long circle, slightly over the German lines, but saw no German planes in the sky.
The mission lasted two hours and, when they came back and landed, Gavin got out of his Nieuport, feeling deflated.
Thaw drifted over to where the young man stood, pulled off his helmet, and grinned at him. “Wanted to shoot down a Jerry, did you?”
“Well, I thought we might at least see some,” Gavin said.
Thaw squinted upward at the sky. “Don’t worry. You’re going to see plenty, if what I hear is true. The Germans have got themselves a new airplane called the Fokker and a whole stable of hotshot pilots under their ace, Boelcke. We got some information that they’re going to be coming at us with everything they’ve got. So, in the meantime, we’re going to drill the socks off of you pups!”
And so it was for the next three weeks. Gavin went up every day. They drilled, they trained, they simulated dogfights, but they kept far back of the German lines. Then one day Thaw came by, saying to his young friend, “You know what I’ve been telling you about these new airplanes made by this man called Fokker? Well, the word down the line is they’ve hit. They’re shooting our men down like they were sparrows.” The lieutenant’s face was grim and his mouth a thin line. “I wish we had some of those new Camels they’re building in the factories here. But we won’t get ’em for a while. Meanwhile, just stay under Daddy’s wing.”
Gavin dreamed that night of a blue sky filled with airplanes—some, with the red, white, and blue target on the side denoting America; others, with the Iron Cross of Germany. He could almost hear the staccato sound of machine guns and the whistling of air through the wires of his ship. He woke up just as his craft seemed ready to burst into flame.
He wiped the cold sweat off his face, his hands shaking. Got to do better than this, he thought. Can’t let the other fellows down.
Germany had been fighting a two-front war for more than a year. Since it was winning on the Eastern Front, but was in a stalemate in the West, the German High Command had decided to pull out more of the men who were chasing the Russians and send them to France.
Manfred von Richthofen boarded a train heading for a large airfield. Halfway to his destination, he walked to the dining car. Seeing an empty seat, he asked the lieutenant sitting on the other side of the table if he might join him. The man’s face looked familiar—squarish, with neatly parted blond hair, wide nose, thick lips, large boyish eyes. It was a shy face. Von Richthofen thought he had seen it in the newspapers.
“Lieutenant von Richthofen,” he introduced himself.
“Lieutenant Boelcke,” came the equally formal reply.
Von Richthofen blinked, for he was staring at his country’s most famous ace. Oswalt Boelcke had already been awarded the Iron Cross, and had shot down fifteen French fighters. But Boelcke was more than a fighter; he was a student of planes and a teacher of flyers. Manfred had read everything he could about the man, which was not a great deal, and now he carefully approached the famous pilot and, during that train
ride, got to know him fairly well. Von Richthofen, before he left the table, resolved to cultivate Boelcke’s friendship.
During the following weeks, Manfred von Richthofen continued to learn his trade, but all the time he had but one thought—to become the best fighter pilot in Europe.
One afternoon, on his way back to Germany from a tour of air groups in Turkey, Oswalt Boelcke appeared at his air station. The trip had been arranged by the High Command with the double purpose of giving Boelcke a rest after his nineteenth kill and showing the German and Turkish forces how to fight. Boelcke had shot down more enemy airplanes than any other German and was now being touted by Berlin as the world’s greatest combat pilot.
Now, Boelcke was looking for talent. Von Richthofen was one of the pilots sitting around the dining table that afternoon and he smiled at Boelcke whenever their eyes met. After the meal, he followed Boelcke to a lounge and listened attentively while the pilot described conditions in France and some of the outstanding Allied pilots the Germans were encountering there. Finally the officers began to leave, and Boelcke explained to von Richthofen why he had come.
“I must have the best fighter pilots in the world,” he said, “and you have come to mind as a likely candidate.”
“I?” von Richthofen asked in astonishment.
“Oh, yes.” Boelcke knew all about von Richthofen’s background—his wealthy family, his renowned passion for hunting, his apparent indifference to women and alcohol. As he sat there, Boelcke asked himself, But what about his temperament? Would he fit into a hunting squadron? Can he stalk in the air, with patience, as he does on the ground? Does he have the eyes and reflexes to be a successful pilot?
Boelcke had talked to his brother, who had told him that von Richthofen had had a difficult start and tended to be ham-fisted, but he was working to improve. He told him also that the young pilot knew almost nothing about how an airplane works or about machine guns, and showed little inclination to learn.
Hope Takes Flight Page 10