The weather conditions were so unfavorable for flight and the landing was made with such conspicuous skill that even the prisoners who hurried to the spot, hungry for any diversion, cheered moderately as the airman, swathed in furs and oilskins, climbed out, threw his helmet into the car and, pushing rudely among them, hurried to the commandant’s quarters. The little group of forlorn prisoners soon dispersed, leaving one apparently half-interested onlooker peering idly into the car.
That onlooker was Thomas Slade.
Archer tells me from his own observation that this plane was of the bad weather type, oilskin coverings, and every part enclosed where enclosure was feasible. Like most of the German planes (and everything else German for that matter) grace and speed were sacrificed to strength and if any aircraft can be said to be built to withstand the buffettings of the weather, the German bad-weather Albatross is the one to do it.
I do not know how Slade felt in face of his great adventure nor whether he considered the punishment which might befall for failure or even for meddling. What he did, he did quickly, for dallying was dangerous business. For a few tense moments he waited, patiently but anxiously. If he had any nerves at all I think they must have been on edge then.
Presently, Lauzerne appeared out of the darkness.
“Have you got the can?” Slade asked him.
Lauzerne handed him a battered tin can out of which he had been drinking water for six months.
“Hand it here and go back a ways and watch if there’s anybody coming.”
Like lightning he removed his almost threadbare jacket, tore off his shirt, slipped his jacket on again, and tore the shirt into several strips.
“Anybody coming?” he whispered, as he broke the string about his neck. He next pulled the pieces of rag about half way through the ring ends of the six rusted bars and to the other end of each bar he fastened a stone with a note wrapped about it.
“Anybody coming?” I can almost hear his impatient whispering.
No one.
He climbed into the car with his strange burden, and drew a canful of gasolene out of the tank. Even in his hurry and peril he was thoughtful enough to ascertain whether there was plenty of gas. Then he was ready—if one can be said to be ready for a flight in a storm who is without any garment save a threadbare suit of khaki.
But he was not destined thus to depart. He had just laid his message-bearing missiles in the car and hung the can upon the bar of his steering gear so that it would not spill its contents with the tipping of the machine, when his companion communicated to him the appalling news that someone was coming. Slade descended from the car, but had not time enough to remove his telltale equipment. Lowering himself upon his hands and knees he did the only thing that he could do in his predicament, which was to creep under the axle bar of the wheels and lie parallel with it in the hope that he might appear as part of its shadow. In this precarious situation he pulled his coat over his head and kept his hands well under his body so that he presented no human sign or feature to the casual glance. You may be interested to know that he told Archer this trick, as he called it, was customary in the art of stalking and that he had learned it when a Boy Scout. So his scouting did him a good turn—to use the phrase you are so fond of.
Presently he could hear ponderous footsteps and was aware of someone approaching rapidly. He felt that his great enterprise was soon to have an ignominous if not a fatal end. What his feelings must have been you may imagine, but he lay motionless and scarcely breathed.
The man approached the car so that Slade could have touched his feet. There he remained for a minute, then turned and went away. Without so much as stirring Slade waited until the footfalls had receded beyond earshot. Then he crawled out. An oilskin tarpaulin had been laid over the opening of the car, raised upon a hoop and buttoned to the sides to shed the rain.
“Quick!” he whispered. “Are you there?”
As his companion approached he removed this tarpaulin (which could not be used thus in flight) and wound it around his body and legs, having first taken his seat in the car.
“Do you want to go?” he asked, ready to cast out the sandbag on his friend’s word.
“Oi, la, la! I am not so crazee!” his companion repeated.
“Well, then, stand ready.”
Slade buckled himself in, fastened on the helmet, and turned on the little electric light and carefully examined and tested the controls. The rudders responded as he expected, the elevating planes moved to his touch. He located the contact button and made sure of that. He felt of the gas manet and made sure that there was nothing to differentiate it essentially from the same thing on French machines. Such differences as he found were merely of style and location. “It is a matter of daring, not of learning;” he remembered those words of Wilbur Wright’s.
I think there is no moment in Slade’s career when he appears so admirable as when he sat there in that Hun machine, self-assured and confident, yet forgetting nothing that he might need to know after starting. “He always used his brains,” Archer said.
“Give her a few spins,” he finally said. He wished the engine to suck in the mixture.
“All right—again.”
“The motor took, first crack out of the box,” he told Archer; “and as soon as I felt the vibration I knew everything was all right—it made me feel as if I could do anything. I pulled back my manet, full gas, grabbed my elevating plane control, and sailed over the barbed wires hitting right into the wind.”
“It made me laugh,” Archer said, “how he always spoke about his controls as if he owned them.”
The story of that extraordinary flight, at least the first stage of it, remains a mystery. It is not until Archer enters upon the scene that we get anything approaching a satisfactory view of that wild night in the skies. There is no doubt that he passed over Arracourt, for one of his missiles landed there, giving timely warning. The rag which was run through the eye end of the metal bar had been dipped in gasolene and ignited but was sufficiently far from the message at the other end of the bar to save it from the flames, particularly as the stone had a tendency to cause the whole contrivance to descend vertically. The flaming rag, as was intended, attracted instant attention and brought a curious horde of people to the field where it fell. Another of these fell in Pont a Mousson where, it is thought, the flier may have seen the light of a burning house and considered the place to be important. It was picked up by a little girl and was the cause of messengers being immediately despatched to Nomeny and Thiaucourt and to Toul, where heavy reserves were in billets.
Only one of the remaining four of these missives was ever found—or at least, reported. That was in the village of Lareaux among the hills about thirty miles southeast of Verdun. So the flier must have succeeded in following the battle line for seventy or more miles in a northwesterly direction. This last missive resulted in heavy reenforcements being sent from the Verdun sector eastward. Archer wished that he had one of these strange meteors for a “souveneerr” and I should like to have one myself. Particularly, I should like to see Slade’s official report of his flight, but the powers that be will not vouchsafe me a glimpse of it.
Archer thinks that after this seventy miles of bucking the wind and rain, Slade must have ascended above the storm somewhere in the neighborhood of the hills which filled the old Verdun salient. He told Archer that for a while he was in quiet air about twenty-eight hundred feet up, but came down in hopes of seeing the lights of towns into which he might drop his remaining missives. He said he lost control in the storm and for a while was almost entirely at the mercy of the elements, turning turtle once, and regaining and keeping his stability by tremendous effort, while being blown in a southwesterly direction. He must have been in the greatest peril at that time.
At last he saw the lights of a large town, or rather that bright haze caused by the blending of many lights, which suggests a populous centre. Here he hoped to make a landing if the lightning showed him a suitable field, and he tried to manouver over the place, awaiting a flash. But he was borne in a southwesterly direction and had all he could do to hold his plane stable. Archer thinks the town was probably Commercy.
In any event, his drifting southward continued until he was above Gondrescourt where he descended into the straight wind current out of the west and found his progress comparatively easy. He was flying due west then, into the very teeth of the wind but it was not as “choppy” at his height as the belated cyclist found it.
It was just after Archer rode out of Gondrescourt toward the west, that he heard the shots and saw the airplane in the openings of the clouds.
Slade’s one object then was to make a landing, but he must wait for a propitious flash of lightning to show him a place. He realized now, as he had not in all the haste of his mad flight, that however friendly his errand he would be shot as soon as the fatal whir of his propeller was heard and the gun crews got a sight of him. With the big black Hun cross upon his machine he was as good as dead if he attempted landing in a town, even supposing he could discover a safe landing place.
And this, apparently, was the outcome of his heroic flight—that he should be a sort of outcast in the troubled sky. He had not anticipated the difficulties of landing in a Hun plane.
As we know, he had twice succeeded in dodging anti-aircraft fire, and he was now resolved to make a try at landing in the devasted flat country which stretched for miles east of Brienne. He knew this country well, had crossed it many times on his motorcycle, and had seen it flooded on one notable occasion when he had ridden from Alsace to Flanders.
He could not, of course, even by flying dangerously low in such weather, pick out the single road which crossed this area from Joinville to Brienne, but in his extremity he chanced to notice far below him a sort of dusky shaft moving along the deserted meadows.
It must have been a thrilling sight to the storm-tossed flier who only by this sign was able to verify his very dubious idea of where he was. He knew well enough that the shaft of brightness came from the headlight of a motorcycle and he believed that the rider, whoever he was, was hurrying to Paris, perhaps bearing the very news which he himself had dropped from his stolen plane.
And here is an instance thoroughly typical of Slade, who could reason calmly in wind and storm. “I knew if I was right,” he said, “and it was what we always called the flats down there, and he was on the causeway road, why, pretty soon he’d get stuck and then he’d throw his light around to see where he was at and maybe it would show me a place to land.”
So he flew lower than it was safe to fly when constant maneuvering was necessary, for of course the strong westerly gale which he was facing would lose all its supporting effect instantly he took it in any quarter. Yet he must manouver in all this hubbub of earth-wind, for the cyclist was proceeding slowly and, as we know, with great difficulty.
It was just at the moment when Archer’s headlight threw its dusky column across the meadows that Slade, alert and watchful, swooped down into the unincumbered area which the guiding light had shown him.
In the whole war I know of no episode concerning individuals which I think more dramatic than the meeting of these two. By all the rules of the story-telling game they should have “parted no more,” but Slade, as I told you, was a sort of stormy petrel, coming and going, and we can only hope to glimpse him on the wing. Even the immediate circumstances concerning his death art more or less of a mystery.