i6 
Land & Water 
May 16, 1 91 8 
I.ieut. Winslow and his Aeroplane 
gun. His success, as I read it, in- 
heres in his superb confidence 
backed by superior skill. When 
that man goes after a Gennan, lie 
kno7iS that he is going to get liini ; 
which is nine-tenths of the battle. 
Jiist now, however, to repeat, his 
pleasure in the event left his fact 
kind and soft, and eager as that of 
a maiden aunt at a christening. 
For matter of that, the two youths 
we presently rounded up, and stood 
against the "barrack wall to be snap- 
shotted, might also have played the 
leading r61e on such an occasion ; 
for instead of the grim men their 
exploit seemed to deniandi two lads 
with the peach bloom of early youth 
still on their cheeks came out to 
met^t us at their major's call. 
They were bashful about their 
age as girls— for the opposite rea.son. 
They would fain liave been older. 
When pressed for the truth, Douglas 
Campbell, a young Califomian, ad- 
mitted to one and twenty. Alan 
Winslow, who hails from Chicago. 
went him one better. Babes ! Just 
out of their legal infancy ! Think 
of it ! But then— this aerial war has been conducted from 
the first by babes. Their major is only twenty-four. 
Of course we want to know more about them. Alan Wms- 
low, then, trained with the French ; therefore must yield 
precedence to young Campbell, who was born and " raised" at 
the Lick Observatory, on the top of Mount Hamilton, in Cen- 
tral California— with its wooded gorges, deep ravines, cosmic 
outlook over foothills and plains, surely an ideal eyrie for a 
young eagle. He had taken his ground training at the Mas- 
sachussetts School of Technology, and was completely Ameri- 
can trained. 
■. Your fighter is never a talker, and of all fighters the airmen 
go the limit in slowness of speech. Even after Winslow, the 
hoary elder of two-and-twenty, was finally prodded on to talk, 
he left so much to the imagination that it is necessary to fill in 
between his wide Unes. He and Campbell had gone out earlj' 
for the first official flight, and were playing cards in a tent near 
their hangar, while the mechanics tuned up their machines. 
The morning was clear ; sunUght streaming between soft 
clouds high over the flying field. From the sandbag- targets, 
where a machine gun was being Uned lip and synchronised 
with the motor, came staccato bursts of firing. Everything 
was going on as usual when, in response to a telephone call 
from some far observation post, a bugle shriUed out the 
'■.\lerte!" ' 
" I was already in my flying togs," Winslow explained," and 
so got into the air at once. Campbell followed about a 
minute later. The Boche planes had just come into view, 
flying quite low, not higher than a thousand feet. Their 
pilots said, afterwards, that they were lost and mistook our 
station for their own, otherwise they would never have ven- 
tured into such a hornet's nest. To me it seemed impossible. 
I felt sure it must be some of our fellows coming in from another 
station. But the ' Alerte' kept me ready. They 'were flying 
higher than we, and the instant I 
sighted the German cross, I let fly 
a burst from my gun. 
"The Boche answered, but 
already I had banked steeply on a 
half loop that carried me above 
him; then, describing a 'vreille,' 
that is, a tail spin, I came squarely 
behind and shot him down with my 
second burst. By that time Camp- 
bell was chasing his man like a hawk 
after a running chicken across the 
sky, and I Ut out after them. How 
that Boche did go ! But lie was too 
slow. Just as I caught up, Camp- 
bell sent him down in flames." 
He summed this remarkable con- 
test in the following schedule : "The 
' Alerte ' sounded at 8.45 a.m. 8.50, 
closed with the Boche. 8.51, shot 
down mv man. 8.52, Campbell got 
his. 8.53, back on the ground." 
Eight minutes by the clock ! 
Good work ! 
It remained for Campbell to add 
tlie touch of humour that cross-cuts 
the most serious dramas — even like 
these, of life and death. "Our me- 
chanics all came running out of the 
hangars to see the fun— till one got shot through the ear. 
Then vou should have seen them duck for the dug-outs. In 
ten seconds the field was as empty as if the dinner call had 
rung" He added, "And Winslow's man? He wasn t 
hurt a bit. I don't think he knew just where he was going, 
but he was certainly on his way, for he ran Uke a hare ; broke 
every record up to half a mile before they chased him down. 
We went into their rooms to view the trophies, guns, car- 
tridge belts, cl6cks, and so forth that were laid out on their 
cots ; and while we were looking them over, Campbell added • 
the last human touch to the story. In sky warfare alone, it is 
said, have the Germans displayed any chivalry— a thing that 
is quite understandable. The uttermost bravery called for in 
those desperate duels up there in the wide and lonely vault of 
heaven is always associated with chivalric spirit. There the 
knightly tradition still obtains, and this lad's utterance proved 
that our bovs can be depended upon to hold it. 
" My fellow was wearing an Iron Cross. I wanted it badly, 
but the poor devil was suffering enough from his bums, I 
hadn't the heart to take it from him," 
Fine feeling ! 
There is no such thing as defeat for men animated by such 
spirit backed up by the thorough, intensive training given at 
our fields. Flying'has progressed since the days when Captain 
von Boelke, the great German flyer of 1914, invented the 
"loop the loop" attack. Happily he is now deceased. But 
were there resurrection for flyers, and he tried to pull any- 
thing hke that on our boys— his shrift would be short indeed. 
By a quick combination of acrobatics he had learned during 
instruction, Winslow had got his man. And as I thought of 
the quick-witted lads of ours that are now getting the same 
training, not by the tens or twenties, but by hundreds of thou- 
sands, I mentally echoed a favourite exclamation of the 
British Tommy : 'Poor old Fritz ! " 
1 
In an Ambulance : By Francis Brett Young 
THIS story is not really mine at all, but that of 
the fellow who lay on the stretcher alongside of 
me, scratching his back (our clean shirts had 
never caught us up), and staring up at the hood 
of the ambulance. He scarcely moved at all, 
lying flat on his back, so that I got him in profile, and could 
see the flies setthng on the tip of his thin nose and worrying 
his lips. You can always tell how ill a man is by his attitude 
towards flies ; and this man, I could see, was prettiy bad. 
His face had that peculiar dusky yellowness that you see in 
men who are on the edge of blackwater fever. He was 
horribly bony ; his features were drawn and waxy, like 
those of a dead man. All that afternoon we scarcely spoke ; 
but in the evening, when the heat of the day had passed and 
the driver had brought us a brew of tea, the fellow brightened 
up amazingly ; and when night came, and our ambulances 
were parked on the edge of the bush, we found ourselves 
thrust into the sudden and peculiar intimacy which even 
the most shy men find easy when they are jolted together in 
a F"ord ambulance. He revealed himself ■ as a quiet and 
homely man of middle age who had joined the Indian Army 
Reserve and been posted as a subaltern to a Baluchi regii^ient. 
Already he liad been fighting for over two years in F2ast 
Africa. Twice he had been sent back to the hills with malaria 
and dysentery. This time, as I had half-guessed, it was a 
mild attack of blackwater. He said that a montli in tlie 
highlands would put him right. 
Of course, I knew that it wouldn't : that, as far as Africa 
was concerned, his campaigning days were over. I told him 
so, thinking, for my own part, that no man could give more 
cheerful news. 
He shook his head: "I hope they won't send me to 
England." 
"My God," I said, " I wish I had your chance. Just think 
of it ! March, . . . April, . . . May. . . . Why, you have 
the prospect of getting to England in spring. You may 
