The Way of the Air: A Description of Modern AviationMiddleton, Edgar Charles
History
The Way of the Air: A Description of Modern Aviation
Middleton, Edgar Charles
Aeronautics, Military; World War, 1914-1918 -- Aerial operations
“Luckily the enemy had given us up for lost, had ceased to
shoot, and we immediately began to climb again. Then the
Germans opened fire, and we only escaped with our lives through
the superb pilotage of L----, with one leg shattered and blood
flowing in streams. At 8000 feet he again seemed to be sinking.
I hastily scrawled a note urging him to descend. He read it,
shook his head decidedly, pointed to me with a smile on his
white drawn face, then pointed in the direction of our lines,
and carried on.
“At times he would faint, and then, recovering himself,
redouble his efforts. At last we were over the lines, but it
seemed utterly impossible that he should be able to land the
machine in his condition. But he did. Choosing a large green
meadow about three miles behind the trenches, he landed as
gently and as easily as if he had only been up for a practice
flight, brought the machine to a stop, and fainted dead away.”
This gallant pilot, as he lay mortally wounded in the field hospital,
and knowing that he was dying, thought only of the terrible time his
observer must have had. Thus he wrote to his mother in England:--
“MUMMY DEAR,
“Don’t be alarmed at my little escapade; will be all right
again soon and be with you.... Poor P----, what an awful time
he must have had after I fainted and we were nose-diving
headlong for the ground!
“P. S.--Please don’t go talking about this business to all the
old dowagers of your acquaintance.”
Officer R---- M---- was on a bomb-dropping and reconnaissance
expedition in the neighborhood of Y---- in the late summer of 1915.
When twenty miles from our lines he was hit by shrapnel and mortally
wounded in the thigh, but making up his mind not to be taken prisoner,
he kept bravely on, crossed the lines, and disdaining to take advantage
of the cover thus afforded and land in the first available spot, kept
resolutely on to the aerodrome from which he had set out, though losing
blood rapidly and knowing he had not long to live. There he made a
beautiful landing, handed in his report, and fell unconscious, never to
come round again.
* * * * *
Early in the present year an air raid was organized to bomb a town not
far from Constantinople. The raid was duly carried out, but on the
journey home one of our aeroplanes was hit by a shell and forced to
come to earth in marsh lands beside a small river. Immediately a party
of Turkish infantry rushed up to take charge of the craft, but before
they could reach it another of our machines swooped down on the scene
and landed close by. The pilot jumped out, ran across a field swept by
Turkish rifle fire, picked up the wounded pilot, and placing him on his
back, staggered across to his own machine. Still subjected to a violent
fusillade, he unthrottled his engine, and with the wounded man carried
before him, bravely flew off and made his own base again.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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