May 2, igrS 
Land & Water 
his cubby hole and we would see only his bark bent over 
the wireless receiver. He now bobbed up holding a slate 
on wliich he had chalked a message just received. It was 
not from the convoy sailing so quietly under our protecting 
wings. It came hurtling along the meridians ; perhaps from 
the Mediterranean ; more likely from far up the British 
Channel. 
" Enemy ships in sight." 
With the German Fleet bottled up in port ? It seemed 
absuro. At tne station that evening, the commander in- 
sisted that the man must have misread the message. But 
^I am not so sure of that. It was the very day that the 
German destroyers made their "tip and run" raid and sank 
the trawler patrol off Dover. It may have been the strangled 
call of a small boat encountered earher in the day. 
"Submarine quite near," a second ran. 
This undoubtedly came from a distance, yet the thrill of 
it tautened Our nerves, stimulated our watch on the waters 
below during the rem3inder of the forty miles we escorted 
the convoy across our sector. 
A red pennant streaming 
from below the golden fish 
belly of our consort gave the 
signal for home, and down 
the streaming path of the 
low sun between the blue 
sky and grey-green sea we 
roared on like great birds 
homing from afar. Our 
consort was flying higher 
than we. and as I watched 
her against the sky there 
came one of those incidents 
that have given rise to a 
rule that no plane must 
ever fly alone. She wavered 
like a duck shot in mid-air ; 
the next instant swooped 
down on a long nose-dive and 
alighted with a great white 
splash. She was sitting there 
when w6 caught up, wings 
outstretched like a winded 
gull, thirty miles from home. 
Twice we circled her to make 
certain she was not in im- 
mediate distress ; then flew 
on, faster than her pigeons, 
faster than the swiftest bird, 
covering the thirty miles 
in a little more than twenty 
minutes ; landing with barely 
enough gasolene to carry us 
ten more miles. Time had sped so quickly, I could hardly 
beUeve my eyes — we had been out four hours and a, quarter, 
and covered two hundred and fifty-seven miles, a record for 
the station. 
Going up, I had felt anything but sure of my behaviour. 
But the novelty, stark beauty of it all, out-sailing the birds 
between sea and sun, had lifted me above fear. But I was 
both greatly tired and stone deaf. Down here, on earth, it 
seemed so confoundedly quiet. The commander's greeting 
sounded as though played on a run-down phonograph on a 
badly cracked record several miles away. Nor. did I fully 
recover my hearing for twenty-four hours later. 
"You'll sleep to-night," my pilot told me; and I did — 
like the proverbial log. 
He, poor fellow, had to hop into a motor-boat and go after 
our consort. She had broken, it seemed, a connecting-rod. 
Darkness fell before the boat covered half the distance. A 
strong tide carried her six miles from the point we left her, 
and but for the hand-rockets her pilot fired at intervals, they 
would never have found her at all. She might have had the 
same experience as another crew that drifted for two days 
and nights before they v/^re picked up. As it was, midnight 
passed before she was towed into the dock. 
We had neither seen nor captured a submarine that day. 
But prevention is better than cure. The daily sweeping of 
the French channels by our patrols has rid them of the 
nesting submarines that used to sow them thick with mines. 
It is human to love adventure. If it were not, where should 
we get men to fly our planes ? It is natural that these flying 
sailors of ours should long for the thrill of actual encounter. 
Instead of for bread, their daily prayer now iMns : "Give us 
this day a submarine 1" But their work will be just as 
valuable if they never set eyes on one during the war. 
* ♦ • * » 
My second flight was made at a third station in North 
France, and I will take up the tale on the morning, two 
weeks later, that I sat with the chief pilot on the quay wall, 
dangling our legs above a miniature gale raised bv the pro- 
pellers of a seaplane that was being "tuned up" for patrol. 
A dozen stout men were holding it, and the big bird's struggles 
in their hands strongly reminded me of a Christmas turkey 
. in sight of the axe and block. 
It was easy to tell this for the war zone. A ne^t of British 
gunboats, the night patrol, cuddled like sleepy ducklings 
under the opposite quay. Two squat monitors, bull-dogs of 
the ocean, drowsed heavily further down the channel — their 
fifteen-inch guns, however, still trained on the German naval 
base fifteen miles away in readiness for anything Fritz might 
see fit to start. 
Behind la}' the Uttle port, battered and mangled by three 
years of war. A single monster shell, fired from twenty 
miles away, had laid in ruins its greatest pride— a fine old 
churcli. Blank windows stared like sightless eyes from dead 
and ruined houses Neither had the station escaped scot 
free. Four bombs had struck 
recently within a few hundred 
feet of where we sat, and the 
huts and hangars were nicely 
riddled by shrapnel and 
splinters. All of which formed 
a grim war background for 
the sea and land planes that 
whirred and whined above. 
A burst of machine-gun 
fire drew our gaze to five 
British planes that were 
manoeuvring in mimic war. 
Three were in swift pursuit 
of two across the sky. But 
just as they gained position, 
the pursued looped and 
dropped on the tails of pur- 
suers with bursts of blank 
fire that put them, techni- 
cally, do.wn and out. It was 
fascinating to watch these 
green pilots practising every 
trick of the garte they would 
soon be called up to try on 
the Boche. But when he 
spoke, the chief pilot's point- 
ing finger indicated a dozen 
white specks at least fourteen 
thousand feet up in the blue. 
"That is the British bomb- 
ing squadron returning from 
a raid. They are big fellows 
that can do a hundred and 
fifty miles an hour with a heavy load of bombs. Fritz is always 
claiming aii-supremacy, and finds fools even among ourselves 
to believe his boasts. Those chaps have evidently made a big 
killing. They fly low and drop quietly into camp when the 
luck is bad." Just then, from that awful height, the planes 
began to drop earthward in a series of dizzy loops. "There 
they go ! pulling the joy-stick to beat the band. They 
must have cleaned up the German submarine base." 
He turned and looked up at the last plane, which was 
tying the finishing double-knot in the atmosphere before 
dropping into camp. "There's no getting away from it — 
these British lads have set us a terrific pace./ We'll have to 
go some to catch up." 
The glint in his eye, however, told that they were going 
to try. He was a quiet chap, anyway ; not given to talk. 
Only by accident had I discovered that he had come into 
the American Naval Aviation Service from the Lafayette 
Escadrilla, and had been mentioned by both the French and 
Belgian Governments for shooting down German planes ; 
and he simply would not talk about it. But he was quite 
eloquent about his fellows. Two of them, an officer pilot 
and bluejacket observer, had crashed fatally the preceding 
week ; but it had not affected the nerve of the others. All, 
for matter of that, had had their shaves. One had driven 
a plane at a hundred miles an hour between two trees twelve 
feet apart. He stripped both wings and landed with the 
motor in the bushy top of a pine a hundred feet away, from 
which he climbed down and walked back to his hangar. 
Yesterday one of the little fighting planes that guard the 
hydros on patrol had crashed on the other side of the Channel, 
and sunk at once, leaving its pilot swimming for his Hfe. He 
was almost exhausted when picked up by the hydroplane he 
was guarding ; but though no hves were lost, the accident gave 
rise to one of tliosc minor tragedies the birds and beasts contri- 
bute to the war. His carrier pigeons went down with the plane. 
Converted Yacht guarding Convoy 
Photo taken from a Seaplane by Author 
