"Green Balls" : The Adventures of a Night-Bomber — Reading Companion

There were no ships in sight, and a cold night wind began to come across the quivering, shining surface of the sea, and the horizon vanished in a faint haze.

The pilot loaded his Very pistol with a cartridge and fired it. A great ball of white fire sailed through the air and dropped hissing in the water.

Meanwhile, in our scant clothes we were getting cold. Soon it would be quite dark, and we had only half a dozen signal lights left, while we were slowly drifting, we knew not whither, with the tide.

Every quarter of an hour the pilot fired a white Very's light. I found it very lonely sitting in the drifting seaplane, surrounded by a misty circle of water, with darkness creeping over the sea.

After some time we saw, far away, a red moving light. At once the pilot fired another signal. The red light moved on and drew nearer to us. Soon we could see the shape of the boat on which it was, and to our joy realised that it was a British destroyer. After a good deal of manoeuvring it drew alongside us. We hailed it and shouted our explanations. A boat was lowered from the destroyer, and rowed over to us carrying a hawser. When we had fastened this to the seaplane we got into the boat, and were rowed to the waiting vessel.

The commander explained that we had landed in the midst of sandbanks, and that it had been a difficult matter to draw near to us.

Soon we were dining in the little mess, and we were very glad to get under cover again, and to have something to eat. The "skipper" was most hospitable, and afterwards, I am ashamed to say, we played "Slippery Ann," and won some money off him.

At last we arrived once more in the harbour. A motor-boat left the slipway, and we were towed ingloriously ashore at about 11 o'clock.

There is an element of uncertainty in seaplaning, as in every branch of flying. There is the case of a seaplane which landed at sea with engine trouble. A German submarine came alongside and took the two unfortunate airmen aboard, and sank the seaplane, so that shortly afterwards the two officers who had been flying through the air were under the surface of the sea.

I remember another incident that happened during the attack on Verdun, which will demonstrate how an extraordinary chain of adventures may come swiftly and unexpectedly to an airman engaged on the most normal routine work.

One day five machines were to fly from one aerodrome in France to another one about fifty miles away. Both the aerodromes were well behind the lines. The leading machine was piloted by a man who knew the country "inside out," and so the last man of the formation knew that if he were to follow his lead he would be all right. It was an extremely cloudy day, and when they had drawn near to the new aerodrome, the last pilot lost sight of the other four machines in the clouds. He flew on for a little while, and climbed up through the barrier of vapour until he was above it. Then, to his joy, he saw ahead of him the four machines, which were flying several miles away, resembling little black dots.

After a time he drew close to them, and, to his great astonishment, they dived down on him, firing their machine-guns. Suddenly he saw that they were marked with the German mark--the black cross. Realising that he was hopelessly outnumbered, as he was on a comparatively slow machine, he put his nose down and tried to get away. He was flying east towards the German lines, but he could not turn, for every time he looked back he saw these four machines just behind his tail, firing frantically at him.

At last he outdistanced them, and they turned away. He flew on under the deep blue of the sky, and over the sunlit white fields of cloudland, which lay like a tumbled carpet of cotton-wool beneath him, as far as he could see.

He looked at his watch, and saw that he had been flying east for twenty minutes, so he turned and flew due west, towards the French lines. He flew for another ten minutes to make sure of regaining his own lines, and then, throttling his engine, he glided down towards the barrier of cloud. He reached it, and flew for several minutes through damp grey vapour, and at last burst through, and saw the sunless world below.

He looked round for an aerodrome in which to land, and in a few minutes saw a line of hangars some miles distant. At once he turned towards them, and when he was a mile away, he throttled his engine and began to glide down in order to land. He sailed just over the roofs of the hangars, floated a few feet over the grass, and was just about to land when he saw that the machines lined up by the sheds were marked with the black cross. It was a German aerodrome.

Even as he started up his engine and rushed across the grass, the German mechanics climbed into the back seats of the aeroplanes and began to fire at him, while other men started up the engines. Very soon several machines were pursuing him. He dare not climb, for he would lose speed, and would not be able to escape. He flew on, due west, twenty feet or so from the ground, dodging round farms and trees, and now and then jumping over houses, while a mile behind him the German scouts followed him in this strange steeplechase.

He realised now that the wind high up had been blowing strongly due east. It had taken him a long way over the lines, and so he had not allowed himself enough time to get back before he had dived through the cloud-bank.

Again he managed to escape in the chase, and left the pursuing aeroplanes far behind. Ahead of him he could see a line of curling smoke and vapour, with here and there little white puffs of smoke in the air. He was drawing near the lines, and evidently there was an action of some kind in progress. Soon he reached the belt of desolation, of broken houses, shell-torn trees, and devastated fields. Machine-guns on the ground began to fire at him. He could hear their staccato hammering, and could see the flaming streak of the bullets passing by him.

Now he could hear, too, above the roar of the engines, the thud and crash of the shells and of the guns. Everywhere below were great spouts of smoke and earth leaping up as shell after shell burst on the ground. The air was full of the shrapnel barrage against the infantry. Once he had a sudden inspiration to pull back his control-stick. The machine shot up into the air, and he saw just beneath the smoke-burst of a shrapnel shell. If he had continued on a straight course he would have been hit by it, and probably brought down.

Below him he saw something extremely interesting. In the sunken roads and shattered fortifications near Douaumont were masses of grey-green soldiers. The Germans apparently were gathered for an attack. He noted where these men were, and flew on across the shell-torn area behind the French lines, and landed as soon as he could. The machine ran into a shell-hole and crashed. He crawled out of the wreckage and stumbled across the churned-up ground to the nearest headquarters and reported what he had seen. Immediately action was taken by the French, the counterattack was forestalled, and the whole course of the battle was changed.

Soon afterwards the airman reached the aerodrome without his machine, and found he had been reported as missing.

That such an extraordinary chain of adventures can come to a man unexpectedly shows vividly the uncertainty and the romance of flying. The night-bomber, as he leaves his aerodrome, never knows whether, when dawn comes, he will be in his bed at the camp, or in a Dutch guard-room, or hiding in a German wood.

For several months I led an agreeable placid life at the seaplane station. At dawn or at dusk I flew over the sea on my long solitary flights. During the day I wandered round the station, learning about the machines and the engines, and spending many hours in the wireless hut, with the vulcanite receivers over my ears, hearing ship after ship sending its messages in a variety of notes--some high-pitched whines; some urgent, impetuous; some tremendously loud--great cruisers thundering their unquestionable commands; some faint and remote from lonely vessels far away on distant seas.

Wireless telegraphy is a romantic thing. I remember one night walking down a path at a Naval Air Service Station in England and passing a lighted window in a little hut. Some one handed to me through the window a pair of telephone receivers attached to a twisted cord. I put the receiver over my ears and heard the regular scratch, scratch, scratch of the Morse Code.

The operator inside told me that it was a German merchant sending messages from a wireless station outside Berlin to a friend in Madrid, and in that quiet dim path in England I was overhearing their conversation.

One day I was unexpectedly summoned to the Commanding Officer of the Squadron. He handed to me a printed sheet of paper. To my surprise it ordered me to report to No. X Wing (Handley-Page Squadron).

I could hardly realise it at first. I thought that many months of this quiet dreamy life lay before me. I expected no transfer, and at any rate not to this most strange of all squadrons. In those days a Handley-Page was a freak machine that was a topic of conversation in flying circles everywhere.

A Handley-Page then seemed a grotesque giant. There had been no intermediate steps between small machines and this Colossus, which rumour had it could carry twenty-two men. It was as though a fifty-storey sky-scraper, as large as the Woolworth Building in New York, had suddenly been erected in London.

I had seen, at my training aerodrome, the first of these great machines looming in its hangar. I had clambered over it with astonishment. I had been one of a large crowd which had stood on the aerodrome, and had wondered, as the great structure moved clumsily across the grass, if it really would mount in the air. I had seen it rise and roar round the aerodrome with its deep, double throbbing note, and had gone away full of excitement, proud to have been there.

Little did I imagine that I was to be on the very first which flew to France, and that I was to be on the pioneer squadron of the gigantic night-bombers.

So when I received my orders, I packed my bags a little bemusedly, and with a sad heart left the little harbour, the rows of seaplane sheds, the mess, and my friends--taking away many a memory of quiet days in the marshes, and of almost ecstatic dawn patrols over the grey and silver levels of the North Sea.

I was going on to unknown destinies and unknown destinations. I knew the familiar sensation every man in the service going to a new place must feel so often--of leaving a certain existence and going on towards an uncertain one.

Although I did not know it, I was going to a year and a half of adventure, of travel, of war and excitement--I was going to a romantic and strangely appealing life, full of successes and disappointments, full of dreams and realities. The gods had smiled on me, and were leading me to the fantastic and fascinating work which I would have chosen above all others in the world--Night Bombing.

"The wings are stretched: the mighty engines roar; And from this lovèd land I must depart."

--_Crossing the Channel._

When I arrived at the Handley-Page aerodrome I realised that, for the second time in the war, I was to have the good fortune to be attached to a pioneering branch of the Air Service, and that, instead of going to a cut-and-dried task, I was to assist in operations which had been untried and were entirely experimental. I had been, as a second-class air mechanic, a balloon hand on the very first kite balloon used by the British, and had accompanied it to the Dardanelles on a tramp steamer early in 1915. Now I was to be the first observer on the huge night-bombers, which were to prove of such tremendous value to the British.

I found the squadron to be as a new-born babe, blinking at the light of day. In a couple of vast green hangars slept two gigantic machines. The skeleton of a third hangar reared its wooden lattice-work against the deep August sky, and everywhere lay heaps of material and stores.

A few officers were already there--among them the squadron commander, whom I soon learnt to know as a giant among men from a commanding point of view. He was one of those splendid leaders that are rare, but are never to be forgotten when they are met--the type of man who, by sheer personal magnetism, could make a body of men achieve almost impossible feats.

On one occasion he wished to move an enormous hangar, complete with its canvas curtains and covers, a hundred feet long and forty feet across, about four times as big as an average cottage. The whole was extremely heavy, and weighed many tons. The C.O. called a bugler, and the call _Clear Lower Deck_ was sounded. When every hand, from cook to clerk, had fallen in, he distributed the men round the hangar, gave the order, "One, two, three, _Lift_," and marched the unwieldy structure across the ground to its new position in a few minutes. In this way he rearranged the whole aerodrome.

The C.O.--"_our_ C.O.," as we called him--would never call on his officers or men to do work he would not be prepared to do himself. One day, in the stress of action on the Western Front, an order came to the squadron to undertake an operation which meant grave danger to the airmen taking part in it. The C.O. decided, against regulations, to pilot the leading machine himself. He never told the senior command, and he knew that he would probably never return to receive censure. However, he would not send out his officers on a dangerous task without himself taking the same risk. Fortunately, the orders were cancelled, but his heroism was not forgotten.

Quickly the station expanded. More and more officers and men arrived. More and more machines landed, and were stowed in the newly-erected hangars.

I soon had my first flight in a Handley-Page, standing on a platform in the back, looking below as though I were on a high balcony. In front of me the two little heads of the pilot and observer protruded from the nose; on either side were the two great engines between the wings; behind me was the thirty foot of tapering tail, with the great double tail-plane vibrating at the end.

One evening I went on the most beautiful flight I ever made. For the only time I can remember, I saw the world look lovely from the air. We were flying in the heart of an early autumn evening, and the west was ablaze with pale gold and decked with rose-tinted clouds. On the country beneath me lay a rich mantle of blue mist. The whole air was warm with the glowing colours of the sunset. Over the machine, over the face of the pilot, and over my hands lay a faintly luminous hue of amber-red. Below there stretched a view of field and farm, and wood and lane, enchanted by the sapphire haze. The world lay under a spell of exquisite beauty, and a tranquillity of peace which was sheer pain to see, so lovely was it. Here and there shone a light in some happy cottage, where the contented labourer sat beside the welcome fire with his wife and children. Far on the right lay the sea, dim and vast, and apprehensive of the night which was advancing with its banners of darkness from the east.

Silently we glided over the unreal world. The sunset faded slowly, and we sank into deeper and yet deeper blue. The gold crept from our faces and hands, and the solemn silence of the evening enveloped us more and more. Soon we drifted low over the trees, whose leaves quivered gently with the fragrant breeze of the twilight. The last shades of dusk turned the landscape into a sombre dream of scarce-seen hills, and the gloomy edge of a woodland. Over a field we floated gently, and ran softly over the dewy grass....

The earth has usually no beauty for the airman. Mountain peaks, valleys, ravines, and curving downs are absorbed in one flat plain, strangely patterned with dull brown and yellow and green shapes, with dark patches here and there for woods and white ribbons for roads; with black lines for railways, red blotches for villages, grey and brown stains for towns. A person who loves the beauty of nature, and has artistic sensibilities, should never fly. If he must, he should fly only at the edge of the evening, and should glide into the blue magic of the dusk.

Meanwhile, at the squadron, the days of preparation passed--days of superintending the erection of hangars, of sunny flights over the long surf-lined sands, of mushroom picking in the wind-blown grass of the rolling fields. October came, and with it the order for departure.

The great machine was prepared. Heavy tool-boxes, engine spares, tail trolleys, and a mass of material were packed into its capacious maw. The tanks were filled with petrol, oil, and water. The engines were tested again and again. The day came. A pile of luggage stood on the ground beneath the machine; farewells were said; gloves, goggles, boots, and flying caps were collected ... and it rained.

Back into its hangar went the machine. Back into the tents went the luggage. Back into the mess went the disappointed airmen.

For three or four days this happened, but at last a gentle breeze, a clear horizon, and a blue sky greeted the morning. Once again the suit-cases and trunks were packed inside the machine. I put my little tabby kitten into her basket and tied a handkerchief over the top, and lashed the whole on to the platform in the back of the aeroplane.

The six airmen dressed themselves in their sky-clothes and took their places--the C.O. at the wheel. A whistle was blown; farewells were shouted; the engines roared, and we mounted triumphantly into the air over the countryside of Thanet. For a time we circled over England, and saw the villages shrink to red flowers on the carpet of harvest gold and brown plough and dull green meadow land, which was fringed by the yellow and white line of the curving shore. The little haycocks became mushrooms; cows looked like little dots of white and black on the green fragments of the mosaic; and more and more the sea, the wide glittering sea, dominated the landscape.

Then the machine turned S.E. towards France. Looking ahead, with the glorious wind rushing across my face, I could see the three leather-helmeted heads of the pilot, the observer, and the officer in the front cockpit, and below them the shining Channel. Looking through the slats of the platform between my feet I could still see hedgerows and plump red farms. Then we passed over the cliffs, whose summits appeared to be on the same level as the sea, and below me I saw the waves.

I was leaving England behind! I had to look back over the tail to see the white line of the cliffs and the sweep of the Isle of Thanet coast from Birchington to Ramsgate. I began to feel a lump in my throat. I was not eager to look forward to see the first glimpse of France through the sea mist. My thoughts were full of the sadness of bereavement. I knew not what lay ahead--what France and war might bring me. I knew not how long I would be from my own well-known country, or even if I would ever return. Later on, after leave in England, I found no heart-sinkings when I left Dover on a destroyer--for I had grown used to leaving England--but now my departure was potent with sorrow. I felt almost inclined to fling out my arms to the fast-fading homeland.