High Adventure: A Narrative of Air Fighting in France

Lieutenant Talbott joined us as we were taking our height again. He took command of the patrol and Barry went off hunting by himself, as he likes best to do. There were planes everywhere, of both nationalities. Mounting to four thousand metres within our own lines, we crossed over again, and at that moment I saw a Letord, a three-passenger réglage machine, burst into flames and fall. There was no time either to watch or to think of this horrible sight. We encountered a patrol of five Albatross planes almost on our level. Talbott dived at once. I was behind him and picked a German who was spiraling either upward or downward, for a few seconds I was not sure which. It was upward. He was climbing to offer combat. This was disconcerting. It always is to a green pilot. If your foe is running, you may be sure he is at least as badly rattled as you are. If he is a single-seater and climbing, you may be equally certain that he is not a novice, and that he has plenty of sand. Otherwise he would not accept battle at a disadvantage in the hope of having his inning next.

I was foolish enough to begin firing while still about three hundred metres distant. My opponent ungraciously offered the poorest kind of a target, getting out of the range of my sights by some very skillful maneuvering. I didn't want him to think that he had an inexperienced pilot to deal with. Therefore, judging my distance very carefully, I did a renversement in the Lieutenant Barry fashion. But it was not so well done. Instead of coming out of it above and behind the German, when I pulled up in ligne de vol I was under him!

I don't know exactly what happened then, but the next moment I was falling in a vrille (spinning nose dive) and heard the well-known crackling sound of machine-gun fire. I kept on falling in a vrille, thinking this would give the German the poorest possible target.[2]

Pulling up in ligne de vol I looked over my shoulder again. The German had lost sight of me for a moment in the swiftness of his dive, but evidently he saw me just before I pulled out of the vrille. He was turning up for another shot, in exactly the same position in which I had last seen him. And he was very close, not more than fifty metres distant.

I believed, of course, that I was lost; and why that German didn't bag me remains a mystery. Heaven knows I gave him opportunity enough! In the end, by the merciful intervention of Chance, our godfather, I escaped. I have said that the sky had cleared. But there was one strand of cloud left, not very broad, not very long; but a refuge,—oh! what a welcome refuge! It was right in my path and I tumbled into it, literally, head over heels. I came skidding out, but pulled up, put on my motor, and climbed back at once; and I kept turning round and round in it for several minutes. If the German had waited, he must have seen me raveling it out like a cat tangled in a ball of cotton. I thought that he was waiting. I even expected him to come nosing into it, in search of me. In that case there would have been a glorious smash, for there wasn't room for two of us. I almost hoped that he would try this. If I couldn't bag a German with my gun, the next best thing was to run into him and so be gathered to my fathers while he was being gathered to his. There was no crash, and taking sudden resolution, I dived vertically out of the cloud, head over shoulder, expecting to see my relentless foe. He was nowhere in sight.

In that wild tumble, and while chasing my tail in the cloud, I lost my bearings. The compass, which was mounted on a swinging holder, had been tilted upside down. It stuck in that position. I could not get it loose. I had fallen to six hundred metres, so that I could not get a large view of the landscape. Under the continuous bombardment the air was filled with smoke, and through it nothing looked familiar. I knew the direction of our lines by the position of the sun, but I was in a suspicious mood. My motor, which I had praised to the heavens to the other pilots, had let me down at a critical moment. The sun might be ready to play some fantastic trick. I had to steer by it, although I was uneasy until I came within sight of our observation balloons. I identified them as French by sailing close to one of them so that I could see the tricolor pennant floating out from a cord on the bag.

Then, being safe, I put my old Spad through every antic we two had ever done together. The observers in the balloons must have thought me crazy, a pilot running amuck from aerial shell shock. I had discovered a new meaning for that “grand and glorious feeling” which is so often the subject of Briggs's cartoons.

Looking at my watch I received the same old start of surprise upon learning how much of wisdom one may accumulate in a half-hour of aerial adventure. I had still an hour and a half to get through with before I could go home with a clear conscience. Therefore, taking height again, I went cautiously, gingerly, watchfully, toward the lines.

X

“MAIS OUI, MON VIEUX!”

Late this afternoon we started, four of us, with Davis as leader, to make the usual two-hour sortie over the lines. No Germans were sighted, and after an uneventful half-hour, Davis, who is always springing these surprises, decided to stalk them in their lairs. The clouds were at the right altitude for this, and there were gaps in them over which we could hover, examining roads, railroads, villages, cantonments. The danger of attack was negligible. We could easily escape any large hostile patrol by dodging into the clouds. But the wind was unfavorable for such a reconnaissance. It was blowing into Germany. We would have it dead against us on the journey home.

We played about for a half-hour, blown by a strong wind farther into Germany than we knew. We walked down the main street of a village where we saw a large crowd of German soldiers, spraying bullets among them, then climbed into the clouds before a shot could be fired at us. Later we nearly attacked a hospital, mistaking it for an aviation field. It was housed in bessonneau hangars, and had none of the marks of a hospital excepting a large red cross in the middle of the field. Fortunately we saw this before any of us had fired, and passed on over it at a low altitude to attack a train. There is a good deal of excitement in an expedition of this kind, and soldiers themselves say that surprise sorties from the air have a demoralizing effect upon troops. But as a form of sport, there is little to be said for it. It is too unfair. For this reason, among others, I was glad when Davis turned homeward.

While coming back I climbed to five thousand metres, far above the others, and lagged a long way behind them. This was a direct violation of patrol discipline, and the result was, that while cruising leisurely along, with motor throttled down, watching the swift changes of light over a wide expanse of cloud, I lost sight of the group. Then came the inevitable feeling of loneliness, and the swift realization that it was growing late and that I was still far within enemy country.

I held a southerly course, estimating, as I flew, the velocity of the wind which had carried us into Germany, and judging from this estimate the length of time I should need to reach our lines. When satisfied that I had gone far enough, I started down. Below the clouds it was almost night, so dark that I could not be sure of my location. In the distance I saw a large building, brilliantly lighted. This was evidence enough that I was a good way from the lines. Unshielded windows were never to be seen near the front. I spiraled slowly down over this building, examining, as well as I could, the ground behind it, and decided to risk a landing. A blind chance and blind luck attended it. In broad day, Drew hit the only post in a field five hundred metres wide. At night, a very dark night, I missed colliding with an enormous factory chimney (a matter of inches), glided over a line of telegraph wires, passed at a few metres' height over a field littered with huge piles of sugar beets, and settled, comme une fleur, in a little cleared space which I could never have judged accurately had I known what I was doing.

Shadowy figures came running toward me. Forgetting, in the joy of so fortunate a landing, my anxiety of a moment before, I shouted out, “Bonsoir, messieurs!” Then I heard some one say, “Ich glaube—” losing the rest of it in the sound of tramping feet and an undercurrent of low, guttural murmurs. In a moment my Spad was surrounded by a widening circle of round hats, German infantrymen's hats.

Here was the ignoble end to my career as an airman. I was a prisoner, a prisoner because of my own folly, because I had dallied along like a silly girl, to “look at the pretty clouds.” I saw in front of me a long captivity embittered by this thought. Not only this: my Spad was intact. The German authorities would examine it, use it. Some German pilot might fly with it over the lines, attack other French machines with my gun, my ammunition!

Not if I could help it! They stood there, those soldiers, gaping, muttering among themselves, waiting, I thought, for an officer to tell them what to do. I took off my leather gloves, then my silk ones under them, and these I washed about in the oil under my feet. Then, as quietly as possible, I reached for my box of matches.

“Qu'est-ce-que vous faites là? Allez! Vite!”

A tramping of feet again, and a sea of round hats bobbing up and down and vanishing in the gloom. Then I heard a cheery “Ça va, monsieur? Pas de mal?” By way of answer I lighted a match and held it out, torch fashion. The light glistened on a round, red face and a long French bayonet. Finally I said, “Vous êtes Français, monsieur?” in a weak, watery voice.

“Mais oui, mon vieux! Mais oui!” this rather testily. He didn't understand at first that I thought myself in Germany. “Do I look like a Boche?”

Then I explained, and I have never heard a Frenchman laugh more heartily. Then he explained and I laughed, not so heartily, a great deal more foolishly.

I may not give my location precisely. But I shall be disclosing no military secrets in saying that I am not in Germany. I am not even in the French war-zone. I am closer to Paris than I am to the enemy first-line trenches. In a little while the sergeant with the round red face and the long French bayonet, whose guest I am for the night, will join me here. If he were an American, to the manner born and bred, and if he knew the cartoons of that man Briggs, he might greet me in this fashion:—

“When you have been on patrol a long way behind the enemy lines, shooting up towns and camps and railway trains like a pack of aerial cowboys; when, on your way home, you have deliberately disobeyed orders and loafed a long way behind the other members of your group in order to watch the pretty sunset, and, as a punishment for this æsthetic indulgence, have been overtaken by darkness and compelled to land in strange country, only to have your machine immediately surrounded by German soldiers; then, having taken the desperate resolve that they shall not have possession of your old battle-scarred avion as well as of your person, when you are about to touch a match to it, if the light glistens on a long French bayonet and you learn that the German soldiers have been prisoners since the battle of the Somme, and have just finished their day's work at harvesting beets to be used in making sugar for French poilus—Oh, BOY! Ain't it a GRAND AND GLORYUS FEELING?”

To which I would reply in his own memorable words,—

“Mais oui, mon vieux! Mais Oui!”

XI

THE CAMOUFLAGED COWS

Belfort! On the other side of the Vosges Mountains, with the Rhine Valley, the Alps, within view, within easy flying distance! And for special duty. It is a vague order which may mean anything. We discussed its probable meaning for us, while we were pricking out our course on our maps.

“Protection of bombardment avions” was André's guess. “Night combat” was Raynaud's. Every one laughed at this last hazard. “You see?” he said, appealing to me, the newcomer. “They think I am big fool. But wait.” Then, breaking into French, in order to express himself more fluently: “It is coming soon, chasse de nuit. It is not at all impossible. One can see at night, a moonlight night, very clearly from the air. They are black shadows, the other avions which you pass, but often, when the moonlight strikes their wings, they flash like silver. We must have searchlights, of course; then, when one sees those shadows, those great black Gothas, vite! la lumière! Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop! C'est fini!”

The discussion of the possibility or impossibility of night combat continued warmly. The majority of opinion was unfavorable to it: a useless waste of gasoline; the results would not pay for the wear and tear upon valuable fighting planes. Raynaud was not to be persuaded. “Wait and see,” he said. There was a reminiscent thrill in his voice, for he is an old night bombarding pilot. He remembered with longing, I think, his romantic night voyages, the moonlight falling softly on the roofs of towns, the rivers like ribbons of silver, the forests patches of black shadow. “Really, it is an adventure, a night bombardment.”

“But how about your objectives?” I asked. “At night you can never be sure of hitting them, and, well, you know what happens in French towns.”

“It is why I asked for my transfer to chasse,” he told me afterward. “But the Germans, the blond beasts! Do they care? Nancy, Belfort, Châlons, Epernay, Rheims, Soissons, Paris,—all our beautiful towns! I am a fool! We must pay them back, the Huns! Let the innocent suffer with the guilty!”

He became a combat pilot because he had not the courage of his conviction.

We started in flights of five machines, following the Marne and the Marne Canal to Bar-le-Duc, then across country to Toul, where we landed to fill our fuel tanks. Having bestowed many favors upon me for a remarkably long period, our aerial godfather decided that I had been taking my good fortune too much for granted. Therefore, he broke my tail skid for me as I was making what I thought a beautiful atterrissage. It was late in the afternoon, so the others went on without me, the captain giving orders that I should join them, weather permitting, the next day.

“Follow the Moselle until you lose it in the mountains. Then pick up the road which leads over the Ballon d'Alsace. You can't miss it.”

I did, nevertheless, and as always, when lost, through my own fault. I followed the Moselle easily enough until it disappeared in small branching streams in the heart of the mountains. Then, being certain of my direction, I followed an irregular course, looking down from a great height upon scores of little mountain villages, untouched by war. After weeks of flying over the desolation of more northerly sectors of the front, this little indulgence seemed to me quite a legitimate one.

But my Spad (I was always flying tired old avions in those days, the discards of older pilots) began to show signs of fatigue. The pressure went down. Neither motor nor hand pump would function, the engine began to gasp, and, although I instantly switched on to my reserve tank, it expired with shuddering coughs. The propeller, after making a few spins in the reverse direction, stopped dead.

I had been in a most comfortable frame of mind all the way, for a long cross-country aerial journey, well behind the zone of fire, is a welcome relaxation after combat patrols. It is odd how quickly one's attitude toward rugged, beautiful country changes, when one is faced with the necessity of finding landing-ground there. The steep ravines yawn like mouths. The peaks of the mountains are teeth—ragged, sinister-looking teeth. Being at five thousand metres I had ample time in which to make a choice—ample time, too, for wondering if, by a miscalculation, I had crossed the trench lines, which in that region are hardly visible from the air.

I searched anxiously for a wide valley where it would be possible to land in safety. While still three thousand metres from the ground I found one. Not only a field. There were bessonneau hangars on it. An aerodrome! A moment of joy,—“but German, perhaps!”—followed by another of anxiety. It was quickly relieved by the sight of a French reconnaissance plane spiraling down for a landing. I landed, too, and found that I was only a ten-minutes' flight from my destination.

With other work to do, I did not finish the story of my adventure with the camouflaged cows, and I am wondering now why I thought it such a corking one. The cows had something to do with it. We were returning from Belfort to Verdun when I met them. Our special duty had been to furnish aerial protection to the King of Italy, who was visiting the French lines in the Vosges. This done we started northward again. Over the highest of the mountains my motor pump failed as before. I got well past the mountains before the essence in my reserve tank gave out. Then I planed as flatly as possible, searching for another aviation field. There were none to be found in this region, rough, hilly country, much of it covered with forests. I chose a miniature sugar-loaf mountain for landing-ground. It appeared to be free from obstacles, and the summit, which was pasture and ploughed land, seemed wide enough to settle on.

I got the direction of the wind from the smoke blowing from the chimneys of a near-by village, and turned into it. As I approached, the hill loomed more and more steeply in front of me. I had to pull up at a climbing angle to keep from nosing into the side of it. About this time I saw the cows, dozens of them, grazing over the whole place. Their natural camouflage of browns and whites and reds prevented my seeing them earlier. Making spectacular virages, I missed collisions by the length of a match-stick. At the summit of the hill, my wheels touched ground for the first time, and I bounded on, going through a three-strand wire fence and taking off a post without any appreciable decrease in speed. Passing between two large apple trees, I took limbs from each of them, losing my wings in doing so. My landing chassis was intact and my Spad went on down the reverse slope—

After crashing through a thicket of brush and small trees, I came to rest, both in body and in mind, against a stone wall. There was nothing left of my machine but the seat. Unscathed, I looked back along the wreckage-strewn path, like a man who has been riding a whirlwind in a wicker chair.

Now, I have never yet made a forced landing in strange country without having the mayor of the nearest village appear on the scene very soon afterward. I am beginning to believe that the mayors of all French towns sit on the roofs of their houses, field-glasses in hand, searching the sky for wayward aviators, and when they see one landing, they rush to the spot on foot, on horseback, in old-fashioned family phaetons, by means of whatever conveyance most likely to increase expedition their municipality affords.

The mayor of V.-sur-I. came on foot, for he had not far to go. Indeed, had there been one more cow browsing between the apple trees, I should have made a last virage to the left, in which case I should have piled up against a summer pavilion in the mayor's garden. Like all French mayors of my experience, he was a courteous, big-hearted gentleman.

After getting his breath,—he was a fleshy man, and had run all the way from his house,—he said, “Now, my boy, what can I do for you?”

First he placed a guard around the wreckage of my machine; then we had tea in the summer pavilion, where I explained the reason for my sudden visit. While I was telling him the story, I noticed that every window of the house, which stood at one end of the garden, was crowded with children's heads. War orphans, I guessed. Either that or the children of a large family of sons at the front. He was the kind of man who would take them all into his own home.

Having frightened his cows,—they must have given cottage cheese for a week afterward,—destroyed his fences, broken his apple trees, accepted his hospitality, I had the amazing nerve to borrow money from him. I had no choice in the matter, for I was a long way from Verdun, with only eighty centimes in my pocket. Had there been time I would have walked rather than ask him for the loan. He granted it gladly, and insisted upon giving me double the amount which I required.

I promised to go back some day for a visit. First I will do acrobacy over the church steeple, and then, if the cows are not in the pasture, I am going to land, comme une fleur, as we airmen say, on that hill.

XII

CAFARD

Our outlook upon life is warped, or, to use a more seasonable expression, frozen. We are not ourselves. We make sarcastic remarks about one another. We hold up for ridicule individual peculiarities of individuality. Some one, tiring of this form of indoor sports, starts the phonograph again.

“For the love of Pete! Shut off that damn silly thing!”

“I admire your taste, Irving!”

“Can it!”

“Well, what will you have, then?”

“Play that Russian thing, the 'Danse des Buffons.'”

“Don't play anything.”

“Lord! I wish some one would send us some new records.”

“Yes, instead of knitted wristers—what?”

“And mufflers.”

“Talking about wristers, how many pair do you think I've received? Eight!”

“You try to head 'em off. Doesn't do any good. They keep coming just the same.”

“It's because they are easy to make. Working wristers and mufflers is a method of dodging the knitting draft.”

“Well, now, I call that gratitude! You don't deserve to have any friends.”

“Isn't it the truth? Have you ever known of a soldier or an aviator who wore wristers?”

“I give mine to my mechanician. He sends them home, and his wife unravels the yarn and makes sweaters for the youngsters.”

“Think of the waste energy. Harness up the wrist-power and you could keep three aircraft factories going day and night.”

“Oh, well, if it amuses the women, what's the difference?”

“That's not the way to look at it. They ought to be doing something useful.”

“Plenty of them are; don't forget that, old son.”

“Anybody got anything to read?”

“Now, if they would send us more books—”

“And magazines—”

“Two weeks ago, Blake, you were wishing they wouldn't send so many.”

“What of it? We were having fine weather then.”

“There ought to be some system about sending parcels to the front.”

“The Germans have it, they say. Soldier wants a book, on engineering, for example, or a history, or an anthology of recent poetry. Gets it at once through Government channels.”

“Say what you like about the Boches, they don't know the meaning of waste energy.”

“But you can't have method and efficiency in a democracy.”

“There you go! Same old fallacy!”

“No fallacy about it! Efficiency and personal freedom don't go together. They never have and they never will.”

“And what does our personal freedom amount to? When you get down to brass tacks, personal freedom is a mighty poor name for it, speaking for four fifths of the population.”

“Germany doesn't want it, our brand, and we can't force it on her.”

“And without it, she has a mighty good chance of winning this war—”

When the talk begins with the uselessness of wristers, shifts from that to democratic inefficiency, and from that to the probability of Deutschland über Alles, you may be certain of the diagnosis. The disease is cafard.

The sound of a motor-car approaching. Dunham rushes to the window and then swears, remembering our greased-cloth window panes.

“Go and see who it is, Tiffin, will you? Hope it's the mail orderly.”

Tiffin goes on outpost and reports three civilians approaching.

“Now, who can they be, I wonder?”

“Newspaper men probably.”

“Good Lord! I hope not.”

“Another American mission.”

“That's my guess, too.”

Rodman is right. It is another American mission coming to “study conditions” at the front.

“But unofficially, gentlemen, quite unofficially,” says Mr. A., its head, a tall, melancholy-looking man, with a deep, bell-like voice. Mr. B., the second member of the mission, is in direct contrast, a birdlike little man, who twitters about the room, from group to group.

“Oh! If you boys only knew how splendid you are! How much we in America—You are our first representatives at the front, you know. You are the vanguard of the millions who—” etc.

Miller looks at me solemnly. His eyes are saying, “How long, O Lord, how long!”

Mr. C., the third member, is a silent man. He has keen, deep-set eyes. “There,” we say, “is the brain of the mission.”

Tea is served very informally. Mr. A. is restless. He has something on his mind. Presently he turns to Lieutenant Talbott.

“May I say a few words to your squadron?”

“Certainly,” says Talbott, glancing at us uneasily.

Mr. A. rises, steps behind his chair, clears his throat, and looks down the table where ten pilots,—the others are taking a constitutional in the country,—caught in négligée attire by the unexpected visitors, are sitting in attitudes of polite attention.

“My friends—” the deep, bell-like voice. In fancy, I hear a great shifting of chairs, and following the melancholy eyes with my own, over the heads of my ten fellow pilots, beyond the limits of our poor little messroom, I see a long vista of polished shirt fronts, a diminishing track of snowy linen, shimmering wineglasses, shining silver.

“My friends, believe me when I say that this occasion is one of the proudest and happiest of my life. I am standing within sound of the guns which for three—long—years have been battering at the bulwarks of civilization. I hear them, as I utter these words, and I look into the faces of a little group of Americans who, day after day, and week after week” (increasing emphasis) “have been facing those guns for the honor and glory of democratic institutions” (rising inflection).

“We in America have heard them, faintly, perhaps, yet unmistakably, and now I come to tell you, in the words of that glorious old war song, 'We are coming, Father Woodrow, ONE HUN-DRED MIL-LION strong!'”

We listen through to the end, and Lieutenant Talbott, in his official capacity, begins to applaud. The rest of us join in timidly, self-consciously. I am surprised to find how awkwardly we do it. We have almost forgotten how to clap our hands! My sense of the spirit of place changes suddenly. I am in America. I am my old self there, with different thoughts, different emotions. I see everything from my old point of view. I am like a man who has forgotten his identity. I do not recover my old, or, better, my new one, until our guests have gone.

FROM A LETTER RECEIVED IN BOSTON,
OCTOBER 1, 1918

I've been wondering about the ultimate fate of my poor old “High Adventure” story, whether it was published without those long promised concluding chapters which I really should have sent on had I not had the misfortune to be taken prisoner. I hope the book has been published, incomplete as it is. Not that I am particularly proud of it as a piece of literature!

I told you briefly, on my card, how I happened to be taken prisoner. We were a patrol of three and attacked a German formation at some distance behind their lines. I was diving vertically on an Albatross when my upper right plane gave way under the strain. Fortunately, the structure of the wing did not break. It was only the fabric covering it, which ripped off in great strips. I immediately turned toward our lines and should have reached them, I believe, even in my crippled condition; but by that time I was very low and under a heavy fire from the ground. A German anti-air craft battery made a direct hit on my motor. It was a terrific smash and almost knocked the motor out of the frame. My machine went down in a spin and I had another of those moments of intense fear common to the experience of aviators. Well, by Jove! I hardly know how I managed it, but I kept from crashing nose down. I struck the ground at an angle of about 30 degrees, the motor, which was just hanging on, spilled out, and I went skidding along, with the fuselage of the machine, the landing chassis having been snapped off as though the braces were so many toothpicks. One of my ankles was broken and the other one sprained, and my poor old nose received and withstood a severe contact with my wind-shield. I've been in hospital ever since until a week ago, when I was sent to this temporary camp to await assignment to a permanent one. I now hobble about fairly well with the help of a stick, although I am to be a lame duck for several months to come, I believe.

Needless to say, the lot of a prisoner of war is not a happy one. The hardest part of it is, of course, the loss of personal liberty. Oh! I shall know how to appreciate that when I have it again. But we are well treated here. Our quarters are comfortable and pleasant, and the food as good as we have any right to expect. My own experience as a prisoner of war and that of all the Frenchmen and Englishmen here with whom I have talked, leads me to believe that some of those tales of escaped or exchanged prisoners must have been highly imaginative. Not that we are enjoying all the comforts of home. On the contrary, a fifteen-cent lunch at a Child's restaurant would seem a feast to me, and a piece of milk chocolate—are there such luxuries as chocolate in the world? But for prisoners, I for one, up to this point, have no complaint to make with respect to our treatment. We have a splendid little library here which British and French officers who have preceded us have collected. I didn't realize, until I saw it, how book-hungry I was. Now I'm cramming history, biography, essays, novels. I know that I'm not reading with any judgment but I'll soon settle down to a more profitable enjoyment of my leisure. Yesterday and to-day I've been reading “The Spoils of Poynton,” by Henry James. It is absurd to try cramming these. I've been longing for this opportunity to read Henry James, knowing that he was Joseph Conrad's master. “The Spoils of Poynton” has given me a foretaste of the pleasure I'm to have. A prisoner of war has his compensations. Here I've come out of the turmoil of a life of the most intense nervous excitement, a life lived day to day with no thought of to-morrow, into this other life of unlimited bookish leisure.

We are like monks in a convent. We're almost entirely out of touch with the outside world. We hear rumors of what is taking place at the front, and now and then get a budget of stale news from newly arrived prisoners. But for all this we are so completely out of it all that it seems as though the war must have come to an end. Until now this cloistered life has been very pleasant. I've had time to think and to make plans for a future which, comparatively speaking, seems assured. One has periods of restlessness, of course. When these come I console myself as best I may. Even for prisoners of war there are possibilities for quite interesting adventure, adventure in companionship. Thrown into such intimate relationships as we are here, and under these peculiar circumstances, we make rather surprising discoveries about ourselves and about each other. There are obvious superficial effects which I can trace back to causes quite easily. But there are others which have me guessing. By Jove! this is an interesting place! Conrad would find material here which would set him to work at once. I can imagine how he would revel in it.

Well, I'm getting to be a very wise man. I'm deeply learned in many kinds, or, better, phases, of human psychology and I'm increasing my fund of knowledge every day. Therefore, I've decided that, when the war is over, I'll be no more a wanderer. I'll settle down in Boston for nine months out of the year and create deathless literature. And for vacations, I've already planned the first one, which is to be a three months' jaunt by aeroplane up and down the United States east and west, north and south. You will see the possibilities of adventure in a trip of this sort. By limiting myself somewhat as to itinerary I can do the thing. I've found just the man here to share the journey with, an American in the British Air Force. He is enthusiastic about the plan. If only I can keep him from getting married for a year or so after getting home!

I had a very interesting experience, immediately after being taken prisoner on May 7th. I was taken by some German aviators to their aerodrome and had lunch with them before I was sent on to the hospital. Some of them spoke English and some of them French, so that there was no difficulty in conversing. I was suffering a good deal from my twisted ankles and had to be guarded in my remarks because of the danger of disclosing military information; but they were a fine lot of fellows. They respected my reticence, and did all they could to make me comfortable. It was with pilots from this squadron that we had been fighting only an hour or so before. One of their number had been killed in the combat by one of the boys who was flying with me. I sat beside the fellow whom I was attacking when my wing broke. I was right “on his tail,” as we airmen say, when the accident occurred, and had just opened fire. Talking over the combat with him in their pleasant quarters, I was heartily glad that my affair ended as it did. I asked them to tell me frankly if they did not feel rather bitterly toward me as one of an enemy patrol which had shot down a comrade of theirs. They seemed to be surprised that I had any suspicions on this score. We had “a fair fight in an open field.” Why should there be any bitterness about the result. One of them said to me, “Hauptmann, you'll find that we Germans are enemies of a country in war, but never of the individual.” My experience thus far leads me to believe that this is true. There have been a few exceptions, but they were uneducated common soldiers. Bitterness toward America there certainly is everywhere, and an intense hatred of President Wilson quite equal in degree and kind to the hatred in America of the emperor....

Norman Hall.