CHAPTER X--CORPORAL DON
Not long after this there came another very interesting day in DonHale's life. He had graduated from the first and second classes and wasto make his first flight in the air.
Only those who have gone through a similar experience can understand DonHale's feelings when he seated himself in the cockpit of a much-usedthough sturdy little plane and laid hold of the controls. No veteranairman or famous "ace"[7] could possibly have felt more exultant orproud.
The school by this time had become very full, and many of the _eleves_were obliged to await their turn; so there were always plenty ofspectators on the field; and these generally paid particular attentionto the boys who were making their first trial spin in the air. This alladded to Don Hale's tremendous desire to make a good showing; for hestill had vivid recollections of his preliminary experiences with the"penguins."
"Now, remember, make no attempt to turn in the air," commanded themoniteur in charge. "Perfectly straight flights only; fly no higher thanthirty feet above the ground."
"Get out your tape-measure, Donny," giggled Roy Mittengale. "Remember,every foot adds to the jolt of the fall at the bottom."
"Don't try to imitate Lieutenant Thaw so much that you'll hurtyourself," advised Ben Holt.
"Safety first in airplanes means not to go up at all," chimed inanother.
Don, however, wasn't paying the slightest attention to these jocularremarks, for the mechanic had his hand on the propeller.
It certainly was a wonderful sensation to the young airman when he feltthe machine suddenly begin to move, slowly at first, but rapidlygathering momentum, until, like a high power motor car, it was racing ata speed which made him almost gasp for breath.
Presently the boy gritted his teeth together, and, with a peculiarfeeling suggestive of I-wonder-what-is-going-to-happen-next state ofmind, pulled back gently on the control stick.
And then, abruptly, he realized that the monoplane was traveling aheadwith a most wonderful smoothness. The wind rushed past, lashing andstinging his face with its terrific force, but the heavy gogglesprevented his eyes from being affected.
Don Hale glanced over the side of the cockpit, and, a little to hisdismay, discovered that he was just skimming a few feet above thesurface of the earth.
A quick pull on the control stick sent the monoplane racing aloft, andbefore the boy, trembling with excitement, could bring it to an evenkeel he was far above the height limit set by the instructor.
At first Don Hale had been acutely nervous--even fearful andapprehensive. To him it was a very marvelous thing to be actually offthe earth, the pilot of a real flying machine. And it scarcely seemedpossible that the machine should require so little attention. Like aflash, all the unpleasant feelings that had disturbed him vanished.
Jubilant, exultant, almost ready to shout with the sheer joy of theexhilarating sensations he was experiencing, Don Hale once more lookedearthward. How strange the ground looked flying beneath him atincredible speed! How high above it he appeared to be! If anythingshould happen to his machine a fall from that height might produce mostserious results.
With one swift, comprehensive glance, his eyes took in the boys atvarious points on the field and the planes which, for one reason oranother, were resting here and there on the turf. Then his greatestdesire and ambition in the world was to descend--to return to that havenof safety.
Yes, flying was easy enough; but when it came to making a landing--thatwas where the difficulty began.
Nervously, Don switched off the current and pushed the control stickforward.
And, to his utter dismay, the plane seemed to be falling headlong at anacute angle--the ground to be fairly shooting up toward him.
For one brief instant he had a terrible vision of a fatal smash-up.Then, a pull of the lever in the opposite direction brought the nose ofthe machine upward again. And following this, to the boy's intensesurprise and relief, the monoplane dropped in the most gentle fashion toterra firma, taxi-ing across the field, its speed rapidly diminishing.
When it had come to a stop Don found his face bathed in perspiration andhis pulse throbbing in a way that it had seldom done before.
"By George! Am I actually here!" he muttered.
Notwithstanding the fact that the boy had made a mighty good landing andcould hear shouts of approval coming from the distance he was too honestwith himself to be gratified with the achievement. He knew that it wassimply a case of good luck.
"But just wait till next time!" he muttered, grimly. "By George, theearth never seemed so fine before!"
A number of Annamites presently appeared and turned the machine around.
It was not for some time, however, that Don's nerves quieted downsufficiently for him to put his airplane into motion. With a ferventhope that fate would be as kind to him as it had been before, heswitched on the ignition and once again faced the blasts of wind.
Then came the delicious moment of soaring upward--the ecstasy of feelinghimself borne through the air as swiftly as the arrow from an archer'sbow and that sense of wonderful freedom which the airman alone canenjoy.
As before, he glanced downward, and a humorous thought came into hismind.
"Certainly I'm the biggest thirty feet that was ever known above theground," he murmured. "I hope I don't fly to the moon."
With astonishing rapidity the distant hangars, from hazy, indistinctobjects, became strong and clear. He could see the students andinstructors, watching, it seemed to him, with an interest and closeattention that fired his spirit with the keenest determination to make alanding that would surprise them.
He did.
But the machine was not badly wrecked, nor was he himself injured by thefall of fifteen feet.
It was merely a case, Mittengale genially explained, in which the earthhappened to be that many feet lower than it should have been.
Don said very little. It rather jarred his sensibilities to hear themirthful laughter and bantering remarks and to see the Annamites towingan extraordinarily wobbling machine toward the repair shop. And, besidesthis, to add to his disturbed state of mind, the moniteur, a boyish chapnamed Boulanger, very loudly called attention to the error which hadcaused the accident, between times roundly scolding him.
"Quite a neat little bawling out!" chirped Dublin Dan, soothingly. "It'sa great life if you don't weaken."
"I don't include that word in my vocabulary," exclaimed Don, with a halfsmile.
But though Don Hale's start in the third class had not been particularlyauspicious, nevertheless, by the end of the day he managed to gainsufficient mastery over the plane to receive a "_Pas mal_, Hale!"--"Notbad!" from the same moniteur who had chided him.
That evening, while lying in his bunk, he summed up the situation inregard to himself. There were other pupils who had made faster progress,but the boy felt sure that what he had learned he had thoroughlylearned. He knew, however, that there was a tremendous amount of workahead of him before he could possibly hope to equal the skill of themost humble flyer of the Lafayette Squadron--a squadron which hedevoutly hoped to join.
Difficulties have the effect on some natures of spurring them to greaterzeal and determination; so it was in the case of Don Hale. Each failure,each "bawling out," each chorus of laughter only acted as a stimulus.
In a little less than a week he had acquired sufficient skill in drivingthe machine in straight courses across the field to be promoted anotherstep--that is to the _tour de piste_, or tour of the aviation field at aheight of about three hundred feet.
This was, of course, designed to teach the airmen how to make theirturns in the air, an operation requiring the greatest accuracy and care.Up to this time Don thought he had enjoyed about all the thrills that itwas possible to have, but the first _tour de piste_ undeceived him. Allthe other experiences faded into insignificance when compared to this.In his splendid isolation from all mankind, he was filled with a certainsense of awe a little unnerving at first. He wa
s in a situation where nopower save his own could be of any avail, and on the first two or threeoccasions involuntary tremors shook his frame as the Bleriot monoplanebanked, or swung around at an angle.
Happily, however, there was no tragedy to record. With increasingconfidence, Don dared to rise higher, and within a few hours had reachedthe required altitude. From this elevation he viewed with absorbedattention the wonderful panorama, which, like a colored map, wasoutspread before him, revealing fields of various forms, shapes andcolors, and patches of woods and hills. And dividing the landscape werelight lines--the roads--running in all directions.
His first tour was satisfactory to himself and his instructors. Theturns held no terror for him.
Following this several days of bad weather put a stop to the work of theschool. During the enforced inactivity Bobby Dunlap had his curiosityand interest in Victor Gilbert and Jason Hamlin still further heightenedby a violent altercation between the two, although neither he nor anyone else was near enough to overhear the conversation. The fact, too,that the young chaps had evidently been just on the point of indulgingin a physical encounter made the "Gilbert-Hamlin affair," as Bobbytermed it, decidedly interesting.
"I'm going to find out all about it some day," he laughed, nodding hishead emphatically.
"Bully boy!" chuckled Sid Marlow.
When the period of dull weather was over Don Hale started in withgreater zeal than ever. He was doing his best to equal the record of T.Singleton Albert, who had so far recovered his nerve that he had nohesitancy at all in executing the vrille.
By gradual degrees, Don took his machine to greater altitudes, until, atlength, he was making the _tour de piste_ at a height of three thousandfive hundred feet. Now feeling somewhat like a veteran, he was fullyprepared when the order came for him to perform some of the simplerevolutions in the air. One of these consisted in spiraling down to theearth with the engine shut off and landing almost directly beneath thepoint at which he started. Another was to volplane swiftly downward, andthen, while still several hundred feet in the air, bring the machine toa horizontal position and swing around either to the right or left.
These exercises proved to be a pretty severe test on his nerves, and atfirst affected his head and stomach in a truly distressing manner; butconstant practice, combined with a determined will, finally enabled himto gain the mastery over them, and he began keenly to enjoy the greatand thrilling swoops through space.
At length there came a time to which he had been looking forward mostanxiously, and that was the beginning of his training in a big Caudronbiplane, a rather slow but safe machine. This meant that Don Hale's stayat the Ecole Militaire de Beaumont was nearly at an end.
There were now but two tests before him, one known as the _petit voyage_and the other the _grande voyage_. The first was a sixty mile trip andreturn; the second a triangular journey, each side being about seventymiles in length.
By the time Don had passed these successfully T. Singleton Albert andVictor Gilbert had gone to the great finishing school located at Pau, inthe southern part of France.
It was indeed a happy moment to Don when he received his "_Brevetd'Aviateur Militaire_" from the War Department, which made him acorporal in the French army. This merely meant, however, that he hadgraduated from the school at Beaumont, and, like the two who hadpreceded him, was sent to take a course in "acrobatics" at Pau.
Pau, he found, was very delightfully situated, and within sight of thesnow-capped Pyrenees.
With even added zest, Don Hale entered into the work before him. It wasmore dangerous than anything he had attempted in the school at Beaumont;but the tactics he learned were of extreme importance, being preciselythose used in air fighting on the front.
About the middle of his course Don Hale was ordered to report to theMitrailleuse school at Casso, on the shore of a lake, where soldiers inall branches of the army are trained in the use of machine guns. In atwo-seater, piloted by another airman, Don Hale practiced firing atcaptive balloons and moving targets on the lake.
At first it proved very difficult, but constant work soon enabled him tomeet the requirements of his instructors.
After the completion of this training he returned to Pau for a shortperiod. Following this he went to Plessis Belleville to add a few finaltouches before being assigned to combat duty in one of the escadrilles.
The boy's greatest ambition was to join the Lafayette, where he might benear his chum George Glenn, and he passed through a period of muchanxiety before the matter was finally settled in the affirmative by themilitary authorities.
Proud and happy indeed, in his neatly-fitting uniform, with thecorporal's stripes on his sleeve and the golden wings and star insigniaon his collar, Don Hale set out on his journey to join the escadrille,then encamped not far from Bar-le-Duc, near the Verdun front.
-----
Footnote 7:
Ace--a pilot who has brought down five or more enemy planes.