Alan Bott

“ Black crosses showed up plainly on their grey-white wings. We dropped into a dive toward the strangers.
Under normal conditions a steep dive imparts a feeling of being hemmed in from every side. One takes a deep breath instinctively, and the novice to flying will grip the fuselage, as if to avoid being crushed. And, indeed, a passenger in a diving aeroplane is hemmed in, by the terrific air-pressure to which the solid surface is subjected. If he attempt to stand up or lean over the side, he will be swept back, after a short struggle, beneath the shelter of wind-screen and fuselage. ”

“ Often I have left the satisfying solidity of London, the restful beauty of a Thames backwater, the comforting hospitality of New York, the wealth-conscious heartiness of Chicago, to hear the chanted summons to prayer from the minaret that faced my prison in Damascus, watched the intrigues that coloured Constantinople during the twilight of the Turkish Empire, discuss Bolshevism and the price of revolvers with Vladimir Franzovitch, as he sits on a camp bed in his tiny room at Odessa. ”

“ He knows that dull, loud cough of an Archie shell, the hiss of a flying fragment, the wicked black puffs that creep [Pg 67] towards their mark and follow it, no matter where the pilot may swerve. Should a friendly machine tumble to earth after that rare occurrence, a direct hit, all the sensations of an uncontrolled nose-dive are suggested to his senses. He hears the shriek of the up-rushing air, feels the helpless terror. It hurts him to know that he is powerless to save a friend from certain death. ”

“ But the compass has again settled down to good behaviour, and we are able to get a true course before we climb back to the sheltering whiteness.
A flight inside the clouds is far from pleasant. We are hemmed in by a drifting formlessness that looks like thin steam, but, unlike steam, imparts a sensation of coldness and clamminess. The eye cannot penetrate farther than about a yard beyond the wing tips. Nothing is to be seen but the aeroplane, nothing is to be heard but the droning hum of the engine, which seems louder than ever amid the isolation. ”

“ In those days British bombers from Mudros and Imbros were visiting Constantinople every fine moonlit night, and spreading great terror all over the city. Whenever an alarm, false or real, was given, we were wakened by the firing of scores of machine-guns planted on the near-by roofs. Turkish soldiers, who, next to food and wives, love fireworks better than anything on earth, would continue firing into the vacant air for hours, until all their ammunition was exhausted, merely for the pleasure of hearing the rap-rapping. ”

“ A lean man, who until then had been too busy drinking to speak, began to describe the mutiny in the Baltic Fleet, of which he had been a sailor. In his intensity he seemed to live again through the horrors of it, as with gloating gesture he described how unpopular officers had been thrown into the sea with weights tied to their feet.
"That was bad, very bad," protested White in his halting Russian. "If you are in power and somebody has done wrong, he should be given a fair trial and, if convicted, put in prison. But to kill men merely because you dislike them is very wrong." ”

“ Each pilot and each observer twists his neck as if it were made of rubber, looking above, below, and all around. Only thus can one guard against surprise and yet surprise strangers, and avoid being surprised oneself. An airman new to active service often finds difficulty in acquiring the necessary intuitive vision which attracts his eyes instinctively to hostile craft. If his machine straggles, and he has not this sixth sense, he will sometimes hear the rattle of a mysterious machine-gun, or even the phut of a bullet, before he sees the swift scout that has swooped down from nowhere. ”

“ Usually one bottle of water sufficed for the morning toilet of two of us. Cuthbert and Alfonso remained unworried by the shortage. They never washed.
Nerve-edging irritation will ever link itself to an enforced companionship from which there is no escape, however temporary; and when repulsive surroundings are the milieu for such propinquity the irritation is akin to madness. The reek, the vermin, the heat, the hunger, the confined space, the dirt, and the depression combined to stab our sensibilities, so that by the third day we almost hated each other, individually and collectively. ”

“ Left of us was the salient, studded with broken villages that became household names during the two epic Battles of Ypres. The brown soil was dirty, shell-ploughed, and altogether unlovely. Those strange markings, which from our height looked like the tortuous pathways of a serpent, were the trenches, old and new, front-line, support, and communication. Small saps projected from the long lines at every angle. So complicated was the jumble that the sinister region of No Man's Land, with its shell-holes, dead bodies, and barbed wire, was scarcely distinguishable. ”

“ We drove down the steep hill from Nazareth in three rickety carts. Each of the first two contained a pair of prisoners and a pair of guards, with loaded rifles and fixed bayonets; but H., whose giant height and strength the Turks respected, had a cart and two guards all to himself. At Afuleh we sat until nightfall in a mud hut, with the local population gazing and chattering through the open door, as if we had been strange animals.
We welcomed the change to a covered cattle-truck on the railway, away from prying Turks and Arabs. ”

“ To anybody who has seen a machine broken up by a direct hit at some height between 8,000 and 15,000 feet, Archie becomes a prince among the demons of destruction. Direct hits are fortunately few, but hits by stray fragments are unfortunately many. Yet, though the damage on such occasions is regrettable, it is seldom overwhelming. Given a skilful pilot and a well-rigged bus, miracles can happen, though a machine stands no technical chance of staggering home. ”

“ Gone was the Bosphorus, and in its place we saw the leaden waters of the Black Sea. From the port-hole of Josef's cabin we could distinguish many miles west of us the coastline of the country in which White had spent three years of the most dreadful captivity.
Feodor soon left us, for he had to bring other stowaways into the light of day. From every concealed cranny of the vessel men and women, almost as light-hearted as ourselves at deliverance from the Turks, were coming into the open. ”

“ A medley of thoughts race across the observer's mind as the pilot S-turns the machine over the field he has chosen. A prisoner!—damnable luck—all papers destroyed—arm hurting—useless till end of war—how long will it last?—chances of escape—relieve parents' suspense—must write—due for leave—Marjorie—Piccadilly in the sunshine—rotten luck—was to be—make best of it—Kismet!
One duty remains. The observer digs into the petrol tank as they touch earth, and then runs round the machine. In a second the petrol is ablaze and the fuselage and wings are burning merrily. ”

“ Of all the cities in the Near and Middle East Damascus is at once the most ancient, the most unchanged by time, the most unreservedly Oriental, and the most elusive.
Constantinople is Byzantium—cum Mohammedan lust for power—cum Ottoman domination—cum Levantine materialism—cum European exploitation and Bourse transactions, in a setting of natural andarchitectural magnificence; a city that expresses itself variously and inharmoniously by a blendless chorus from an unmixable mixture of creeds and races; a charming, feminine city with a wayward soul; a cruel, unstable city of gamblers ”

“ We were expecting to see the Huns flatten out, when—"Wouff! wouff! wouff! wouff! wouff!" said Archie. The German birds were not hawks at all; they were merely tame decoys used to entice us to a pre-arranged spot, at a height well favoured by A.-A. gunners. The ugly puffs encircled us, and it seemed unlikely that an aeroplane could get away without being caught in a patch of hurtling high explosive. Yet nobody was hit. The only redeeming feature of the villain Archibald is that his deeds are less terrible than his noise, and even this is too flat to be truly frightful. ”

“ All the writings of biased minority mongers who have confined their investigations to consorting with Soviet officials at Moscow and Petrograd, all the blinkered sympathy of labour agitators who devote their lives to fostering a diabolic discontent, all the chirruping of the mentally perverted women and men who, at a safe distance of thousands of miles from actuality, have adopted theoretical Bolshevism as the latest fashion in parlour enthusiasms, cannot condone the fact.
Money and life were the only cheap commodities in Odessa. ”

“ Half-way to the lines we wave an envious good-bye to the bombers and scouts, and begin our solitary patrol above the clouds.
We cruise all round the compass, hunting for Huns. Twice we see enemy machines through rifts in the clouds, but each time we dive towards them they refuse battle and remain at a height of some thousand feet, ready to drop even lower, if they can lure us down through the barrage of A.-A. shells. Nothing else of importance happens, and things get monotonous. I look at my watch and think it the slowest thing on earth, slower than the leave train. ”

“ Slightly to the south was the one-time German colony of Sorona, with houses empty but for ugly furniture and ornaments, left behind when the routed Turco-Germans scurried up the coast-line after Allenby's victory at Gaza. A few miles north was the trench-line, a few miles west were row upon row of sand-dunes, a sea of that intense blue which is the secret of the Syrian coast, and the ancient port of Jaffa, misnamed "The Beautiful." ”

“ Not with a court-martial as the only alternative could I carry on the job until we have left Archie's inferno of frightfulness. The flight-commander is of the same mind, and we nose into the clouds, pursued to the last by the insistent smoke-puffs.
When the bus is once again flying between sky and cloud, we begin to feel more at home. No other craft come within range of vision, so that without interruption we reach Aucoin, the fourth railway junction to be spied upon. The rolling stock there is scarcely enough for two train-loads, and no active trains can be spotted. ”

“ The Street called Straight, the glass-roofed, unique bazaar and a dozen other city-marks are bafflingly suggestive of contact with a dozen periods of greatness. And last year, when the demoralized Turks marched out of the city under the Arab flag that flew defiantly from the city gate, Arab thinkers began to dream of yet another period of greatness, in which Damascus was to be the centre of a re-united Arabian Empire.... ”

“ At Gezaincourt rumbling gunfire punctuated the countryside stillness; aeroplanes hummed past on their way to the lines, and engendered gratitude for a respite from encounters with Archie; from the ward window I could see the star-shells as they streaked up through the dim night. At Westminster rumbling buses punctuate the back-street stillness; taxis hum past on their way to the West End, and engender a longing for renewed acquaintance with the normal world and the normal devil ”

“ When normal life is upset by abnormal conditions the cauldron of crookedness bubbles over with a thousand and one conspiracies. Every other man is intriguing for himself, his safety, his pocket, his party, his family, or his government appointment, or from sheer inability not to intrigue. Such a period was the late summer of 1918, when we were disguised spectators of the misery and oppression that preceded the downfall of the Turkish Empire. ”

“ The summer countryside, as viewed from an aeroplane, is to my mind the finest scene in the world—an unexampled scene, of which poets will sing in the coming days of universal flight. The varying browns and greens of the field-pattern merge into one another delicately; the woods, splashes of bottle-green, relieve the patchwork of hedge from too ordered a scheme; rivers and roads criss-cross in riotous manner over the vast tapestry; pleasant villages and farm buildings snuggle in the valleys or straggle on the slopes. ”

“ I left Nazareth under much better conditions than I entered it. Accompanied by an Arab pseudo-spy, I had arrived half crazed by weakness, pain, and disaster, with a damaged leg and a swollen face, and possessing neither hope nor a hat. I was leaving it in the company of fellow-officers, with my mind and leg and face normal again, and having not only a German hat but renewed hopes of escape, summed up in Jean Willi's hint:
"The Armenians run secret caravans from Damascus to Akaba." ”

“ One of these striped vulgarities both soothes and warms me as we re-cross the trenches.
Down go the noses of our craft, and we lose height as the leader, with an uneven, tree-bordered road as guide, makes for Doulens. From this town our aerodrome shows up plainly towards the south-west. Soon we shall be in the mess marquee, behind us a completed job, before us a hot breakfast. Life is good.
Arrived on land we are met by mechanics, each of whom asks anxiously if his particular bus or engine has behaved well. The observers write their reports, which I take to the Brass Hats at headquarters. ”