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Updated: May 31, 2025
But he was more than this: he was the ship's wag, and so was greeted with shouts and whistles of approval as he stepped on to the stage attired in the burlesque counterfeit of an airman's costume. Perhaps you might not have thought his song so very funny after all.
After various adventures, during which he was robbed of the airman's property, Dave managed to reach the aero meet at Fairfield. He found Robert King and described to him the boy thief. The airman took a fancy to Dave from the nerve and ability he showed in experimenting with a parachute garment, and hired him.
The puffs would come nearer and nearer as the gunners found the range, until one felt that the next must bring the Taube down. Then suddenly the airman would turn his machine off in another direction, and the shells would fall wider than ever. One's feelings were torn between admiration for the airman's daring and an unholy desire to see him fall.
His imagination was abnormally vivid. Once he discussed the possibility of "falling in flames," which is so often the end of an airman's career. I shall never again be able to take the same whole-hearted delight in flying that I did before he was so horribly eloquent upon the subject. He often speculated upon one's emotions in falling in a machine damaged beyond the possibility of control.
With a quick pull on the lever that controlled the rudder, Tom sent himself aloft, but not before a curious thing happened. On the ground where it had been dropped was a tunic, or airman's fur-lined jacket. As Tom's machine "zoomed," the tail skid caught this jacket and took it aloft. Tom did not seem to be aware of this, though he must have felt that his machine was a bit sluggish in the climbs.
Once the pilot has developed this airman's sixth sense, he need not, and never does, worry about the scantiness of his knowledge of the theory of flight. Sometimes the winds would die away and the thick clouds lift, and we would go joyously to work on a morning of crisp, bright winter weather. Then we had moments of glorious revenge upon the crows.
Larkin grinned. Rarely did they go into the air together but what they engaged in mimic warfare dog-fighting before their wheels again touched the ground. It was the airman's game of tag, the winner being that one who could get on the other's tail and stay there.
The bombardment began at about nine o'clock in the morning, almost immediately after the airman's visit, and I could see the heavy shells bursting in the village at the cross-roads behind us. They were throwing the big shells there to prevent reinforcements from coming up.
And it served men right for inventing them; they should have been more careful. The smile on the dead German airman's face, as he lay on the ground near Poperinghe, floated before him, and he nodded his head portentously. "You're right, old bean," he croaked. "The man I want to meet is the fool who doesn't think it's funny . . . ."
We came to the front feeling deeply sorry for ourselves, and for all airmen of whatever nationality, whose lives were to be snuffed out in their promising beginnings. I used to play "The Minstrel Boy to the War Has Gone" on a tin flute, and Drew wrote poetry. While we were waiting for our first machine, he composed "The Airman's Rendezvous," written in the manner of Alan Seeger's poem.
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