The Unsubstantial Air Read online

  Other pilot-travelers reach England and are shocked by the differences they find in ordinary things. The English trains they board are dinky, they say, and the English landscape is all wrong: it’s green in November, and trees are conspicuously absent, and every inch of ground is under cultivation. London, too, disappoints them; under the weight of war the city is gloomy and quiet, the streets are unlit, and the hotels are dark. They witness that weight on the people they see. At railway stations, Bogart Rogers writes, “you see Tommies coming in covered with Flanders mud, rifles over their shoulders and iron hats strapped to their backs, and you realize that maybe less than twenty-four hours ago they were in the front line trenches.”

  But it’s not only the soldiers who bear that weight; everyone has been hit and hit hard. “I had no idea,” Rogers goes on, “what a tremendous affair the war is, how terrible it is, and how the English people have worked and sacrificed.”

  Surely France will be different; surely they’ll see it—and especially Paris—with more joyful eyes. Josiah Rowe, continuing on his long journey to Italy, crosses the Channel from Southampton to Le Havre and boards a train, thinking as he goes that he’s headed “for Paris—even the mention of that name gave us a thrill.”

  The countryside they roll through is interesting, Rowe writes, though it’s “not nearly so attractive as England.” But the real interest for him and his companions is not the landscape but the people they see at stations along the way. Soldiers and civilians alike greet them with cheers, and the young pilots respond with such French phrases as they have—“Bonjour,” and “À la carte,” and “Bon amis”—and the French folks shout back phrases that the Americans don’t understand. For most of these innocents abroad, the language problem will remain a barrier. But the French will forgive them.

  To Rowe, Paris is the thrilling city he expected, and he responds to its beauty and its history with due reverence: “For real beauty Paris is absolutely unsurpassed. Everything that you have ever read about Paris—and some that you haven’t—is true. I was deeply impressed when we went to see the Bastille and more so at the tomb of Napoleon.” But he’s most touched by the French people he sees in the streets and cafés:

  While everything was greatly subdued there was gaiety in abundance and crowds and crowds of people. Some of the cafes were going full blast and life there was anything but serious … The people are certainly fascinating. White uniforms for men [perhaps hospital convalescents?] and black for women [in mourning] were almost universally worn and you could see that though the weight of war bore heavily upon them, they didn’t take matters so seriously as the English. Their gaiety and frivolity were only on the surface and you could tell that under it all they were hiding untold suffering.

  It’s the paradox that strikes him: the frivolity and the suffering, the gay crowds and the black clothes of the mourning women. So French, he thinks, so unlike the always-serious English.

  Other pilots have other first impressions. They see French women for the first time—not individually, but in crowds, in cafés, and on street corners. In their young men’s minds women collectively are divided into two types: nice girls, like the ones they know back home, and the others, for whom they have many terms, such as “easy women,” “bad women,” “chips,” “painted ladies,” “street women.” Such women, confronted en masse, are frightening, or tempting, or both (remember how young the pilots are, and how innocent). Waldo Heinrichs, on his first day in Paris, writes in his journal: “Women are wild & loose in this city. Many offers for ‘Voulez vous coucher avec moi.’ They grab a person on the streets in their effort. It all looks so loose.”

  Roland Richardson, also on his first visit to Paris, goes out for a good time with two friends. They run into “all the unattached girls in the place.” The girls pester them to buy them drinks. On their way home the three meet more girls hanging around on all the corners; girls take them by the arms and try to start conversations. “Thank goodness we got out safely,” Richardson writes. “Some of them were good looking, but they were all too anxious … Paris is some city.”

  Some pilots react to the swarming young women of Paris differently. The exuberant Kenneth MacLeish reached Paris in November 1917 and wrote home at once: “Here I am, and my little bells are tinkling. And Paris! Oh, it’s far better than even the wildest tales picture it. It’s as much as your life is worth to go out to dinner here. There are literally thousands of girls who say they will show you around Paris, and it’s a two-fisted fight to shake them off!”

  And there are the others, the very shy and the very young, for whom the French women, and the Americans who get involved with them, and Paris itself are just too much to cope with. Dick Blodgett, nineteen years old and fresh off the boat, passes through Paris and writes plaintively to his mother, “I am very much disappointed in French women. They are not nearly so much of a good thing as at college or in Boston.” And a few months later, on his first visit there: “This city is the rottenest morally I’ve ever seen. It seems to degenerate everyone. The boys that go to seed over here are almost beyond figures … I don’t see why they can’t take a girl to supper and let it go at that.”

  Whatever the reactions, it is clear that there are a lot of young women around the cafés and on the streets of Paris and that, as Harvey Conover exclaimed, they are “wild and full of pep.” They’re different from the girls back home.

  George Moseley arrived in Paris in July 1917, just in time for the Fourth of July parade, and put his impressions and emotions in a letter home:

  During the morning of “The Fourth,” American troops paraded in Paris. They were preceded by a company of French soldiers in their blue uniforms which showed signs of hard wear in the trenches. When our troops passed, every Frenchman cheered, old soldiers with the medals across their chests stood at attention saluting, flowers were thrown at our boys by the thousands, people rushed out from the crowd and stuck flowers in their guns, in their hats and all over.

  Most Americans traveling to Europe for the first time expect a place where history is everywhere, in castles and cathedrals and battlefields and great old cities, waiting to be stared at, and where the people are either quainter or more sophisticated than Americans are. There’s some of that tourists’ vision in the first impressions of the young pilots, but it’s colored by the fact that what they are witnessing is Europe at war: many soldiers, some wounded, some still intact, none of them heroes in the romantic sense; and many civilians, some grieving, some frivolous, some hungry; and the darkness that war imposes on nations under its shadow. They share the difficulties and inconveniences that all naive visitors meet: the languages they can’t speak, the food they don’t like, the shabby age of things, and the dirt that goes with it.

  It’s a complex beginning for the lives they will live here. They see it all with newcomers’ eyes that are innocent but alert to its strange particulars. Their first impressions will change: London and Paris will become familiar places that they’ll grow fond of and comfortable in, and the French and British people will cease to be strangers with peculiar customs and become familiar company. They’ll go home after their war changed by Abroad and will find that their world back home has become a different place.

  Not all of them are innocents abroad. Quentin Roosevelt arrived in Paris in August 1917 already familiar with the city, remembering it as he had known it in the years before the war and seeing the wartime city in that nostalgic light:

  It is not the Paris that we used to love, the Paris of five years past. The streets are there, but the crowds are different. There are no more young men in the crowds unless in uniform. Everywhere you see women in black, and there is no more cheerful shouting and laughing. Many, many of the women have a haunted look in their eyes, as if they had seen something too terrible for forgetfulness. They make one realise the weight that lies on all alike now.

  It’s the same Paris Rowe will see a few months later, but darker, because Roosevelt had known it when it was the C
ity of Light. Still, he’s at ease in Paris: he speaks the language, and he has connections there; his sister-in-law has a house in the avenue du Bois de Boulogne that she has opened to visiting American officers, and he stays with her when he’s in town. He knows Paris the way a frequent visitor does—the shops, the bars, and the restaurants.

  * * *

  Ham Coolidge arrived in Paris in the same detachment as Roosevelt. Like his friend, he speaks some French, though less well; he’s just able, he says, to get what he needs at stores and restaurants and inquire his way around the city, but he’s improving! Also like Roosevelt, he has connections in the city; his uncle John is in the American Embassy, and his aunt Helen invites him to dinner, where the other guests include Colonel Raynal Bolling (then Assistant Chief of Air Service, Lines of Communication), Major and Mrs. Scott, his cousin Colonel Kean, and “a Marquise de something, but not much!”

  As for Coolidge’s first impressions of Paris, he exclaims in a letter that “Paris is wonderful,” but the only wonderful detail he offers is “one of the incomparable little patisseries,” where he stops to gorge on cakes. Then he turns to what really excites him—the prospect of working with the group of young officers (Roosevelt is one of them) who will be in complete charge of organizing the vast new American flying school at Issoudun, down in the middle of France a hundred miles south of Paris. “It is a job so overwhelming,” he writes, “and we are so inexperienced that I can hardly believe it all.” It will mean he won’t be able to fly, or only occasionally, and it will look as if he were avoiding combat by taking an embusqué job, but he thinks it’s important. He advises his mother just to tell the folks at home that he is “on special duty connected with the organization of new schools in France.” That will make it sound better—like some secret mission and not just a job.

  Students who reached France in late 1917 and after were generally sent to Issoudun. They arrived there with high expectations; they’d heard of this brand-new American Aviation Center, built just for them. Here they’d begin flight training at once and would quickly move up to the front, long before the students still back in the States even got to France.

  The reality wasn’t like that. When the first students arrived at Issoudun, in August 1917, not only was there no flying school ready for them; there was no airfield at all—only farmers’ fields and a few tents. Before the cadets could fly there, they’d have to build the facilities they’d fly from—the landing fields, the roads, the barracks, the hangars. That would take the whole of the autumn and winter, and the first impressions of students who reached the field during that time would be of a huge building project, and of the rain and the mud. Jack Coffin disembarked from the Covington at St. Nazaire in November and recorded his impressions of his new life in his diary. Here are his entries for his first ten days at the aviation center:

  Mon., Nov. 5: took train at 4:30 for flying school.

  Wed., Nov. 7: Reached Issoudun about eight o’clock. Trucks took us to camp. Time on train 44 hours; time traveling 16 hours. Camp only partly built. It is a sea of mud.

  Thurs., Nov. 8: No immediate hope of flying. Fatigue duty getting barracks into shape. Hell of a hole [he’d said the same about his steerage quarters on the SS Covington]. Rains every day. Mess poor.

  Sat., Nov. 10: More fatigue duty … Men in this camp seem to have been forgotten. There are cadets here who have been digging for months.

  Sun., Nov. 11: K.P. duty today. My kingdom for a good shower bath.

  Nov. 13: Shoveled and hauled cinders, fixing ground in front of hangars.

  Nov. 14 and 15: More cinders.

  It was troopship steerage all over again: partly the discomfort and partly outrage at the gross indignity of it—would-be pilots doing day laborers’ jobs. Not only did the work they were doing have nothing to do with flying, but it was antithetical to what they wanted and had expected—not up in the clouds, but down in the mud, and not free, but regimented. Morale among the students sank.

  That rapid drop in student morale wasn’t only an Army problem. In the summer of 1917 the Navy began a training program in collaboration with the French to teach American seaplane pilots at Moutchic, on the coast north of Bordeaux. The arrangement was that the French would teach the students to fly, supply the necessary planes, engines, instruments, and armament, and construct three new training stations. All the American Navy had to do was provide the students.

  It was a fine plan [one of the students recalled] except that it didn’t work out … From French flying schools we bounded right into the construction gang. We built the navy’s school of aeronautics at Moutchic, roads, hangars, shops, barracks, and schoolrooms … We who had enlisted to fly shoveled sand, toted supplies, broke rocks—and our hearts, backs, and spirits. Morale suffered. There were fights, mutinies, desertions. Courts-martial began to sit.

  All the rottenness in every one came out.

  I was near rebellion—and trouble—many times.

  “Mutiny,” “desertion,” “rebellion”—those are strong words for strong feelings.

  There were no actual riots, because there was too much at stake—the chance to fly, a commission, and a war ahead. But the anger and bitterness the young pilots felt was deep and long-lasting. They had learned a tough old soldier’s lesson: once the Army (or the Navy) has you, it can do what it wants with you. For these would-be pilots, that meant it could keep you on the ground, working and waiting, while at the front other guys flew your war.

  For early volunteers who signed up with the French Service Aéronautique and were ordered to French flying schools, what struck them most forcibly wasn’t usually the fields (which were functioning well), or the planes, or the training they faced; it was the company they’d be keeping. Stuart Walcott had just arrived at the field at Avord in July 1917 when he wrote his impressions:

  There are some 150 Americans learning to fly now in France, besides the ones the Government may have sent over—more than a hundred at this one school, and the oddest combination I’ve ever been thrown with: chauffeurs, second-story men, ex–college athletes, racing drivers, salesmen, young bums of leisure, a colored prizefighter, ex–Foreign Légionnaires, ball players, millionaires and tramps. Not too good a crowd according to most standards, but the worst bums may make the best aviators.

  Some of these types would have been familiar to Walcott—the athletes and the millionaires and maybe the playboy bums belonged to the world he’d left behind at Princeton—young men from families of some substance, with social positions, connections, and confidence, who knew the rules by which their part of American society lived, played the same sports, drove the same cars, married each other’s sisters.

  The others—the chauffeurs and the second-story men—would have been strange to him, as different in the lives they’d lived as Bedouins or Eskimos. They came from all over the place in that vast expanse of America that wasn’t the East Coast—from farms and ranches and small towns and from all kinds of jobs. They hadn’t gone to college, or if they had, not to Yale or Harvard, but to some crossroads college out West somewhere. Their families didn’t have old money or connections with people who mattered; they weren’t, that is to say, gentlemen.

  Walcott put a label on that other kind of pilot later, when he met the members of the Lafayette Escadrille for the first time: “They are a very odd crowd—the members of the Lafayette Escadrille, a few nice ones and a bunch of rather roughnecks. Their conversation is an eye opener for a new arrival. Mostly about Paris, permissions, and the rue de Braye, but occasionally about work and that is interesting. Nonchalant doesn’t express it.”

  They’re “roughnecks”—rough in conversation, rough in experience (what happened, I wonder, in the rue de Braye?)—and interesting. Walcott’s reaction to them isn’t snobbish and superior; its tone isn’t one of class disdain; it simply expresses surprise and delight that the flying world includes such people. They aren’t what he expected. It isn’t only the flying world that he’s discovering to be
so various and strange; it’s the whole world of war. College men like him would have lived their entire lives among people like themselves, had it not been for the war; they’d never have come across a second-story man, or a colored prizefighter, or a tramp. And here they all were. They’d be the men he would fly with.

  That’s what big wars do: they bring together young men who would never meet in ordinary civilian life, dump them together in barracks and tents, and in foxholes and airplanes, set them marching to the same drum, fighting in the same war. It was like that in my war, too; until I went to flight school, I had never met anyone who went to Yale, or came from Texas, or pitched in the International League, or drove an MG. Or a girl who drank Southern Comfort. I met them all before I was done. War is a broadening experience.

  FIVE

  DRIVING THE MACHINE

  July 1917: on the edge of a field in the middle of France, Stuart Walcott sits alone in a contraption made of wood and wire. It looks like a box kite with an ironing board stuck on crosswise and an engine and propeller attached on the front. The whole thing rests on a pair of what look like bicycle wheels. On the grass beside this curious machine a French officer stands shouting instructions in rapid French. “Tout droit!” he says, making a chopping motion with his hand. “Tout droit!” Walcott doesn’t have much French, but he gets the idea; he’s to drive the contraption across the field in a straight line.

  That sounds easy enough; after all, he knows how to drive an automobile: you just grab the steering wheel and step on the gas. He opens the throttle, and the machine begins to move, slowly and bumpily at first, then faster as the back end lifts from the grass. He tries to keep it moving in a straight line, but that isn’t as easy as it would be in a car, since he has no steering wheel and no brakes. As the machine accelerates, the rotation of the propeller pulls it away from a straight-ahead course (an action that’s called torque, though Walcott may not know that).