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Updated: July 23, 2025
The patrols of the Storks Escadrille, in the beginning of the Somme campaign, consisted of a single airplane, or airplanes in couples. Guynemer, whom everybody called "the kid," always took Heurtaux with him when he carried a passenger; for Heurtaux, as blond as Guynemer was brown, thin and slender, very delicate and young, seemed to give Guynemer the rights of an elder.
In the beginning of February, 1917, the Storks Escadrille left the Somme after six months' fighting, and flew into Lorraine. The destiny of a Guynemer is to surpass himself. Part of his power, however, must lie in the perfection of his weapons. Why could he not forge them himself? In him, the mechanician and the gunsmith were impatient to serve the pilot and the fighter.
Their own anti-aircraft batteries were in emplacements near the field. Though detached from the British forces and under French command this unit followed the rule of His Majesty's armies in France by receiving all of its food and supplies from England. It had its own transport service. Our escadrille had been in Luxeuil during the months of April and May.
That meant the American Escadrille was to fly the Nieuport the best type of avion de chasse and hence would be a fighting unit.
The advance began last Thursday night and each day has brought the lines closer to Saint Quentin and the region north and south of it. On Monday morning Mac, Parsons, and myself went out at nine o'clock on the third patrol of the escadrille. We had orders to protect observation machines along the new lines around the region of Ham. Mac was leader. I came second and Parsons followed me.
At 4,500 feet you throttle down and wait on that level for your companions to catch up. Soon the escadrille is bunched and off for the lines. You begin climbing again, gulping to clear your ears in the changing pressure. Surveying the other machines, you recognize the pilot of each by the marks on its side or by the way he flies.
"I guess your flag...oh, hell! Aileen was not strong enough to nurse so she bade a passionate good-by to her friends and engaged herself to Bob Cheever. Jimmie Thorne went to France as an ambulance driver, and Bascom Luning to join the Lafayette Escadrille. Gora sailed six months later to offer her services to England. In the case of a nurse there was much red tape to unravel.
We American pilots, who are grouped into one escadrille, had been fighting above the battlefield of Verdun from the 20th of May until orders came the middle of September for us to leave our airplanes, for a unit that would replace us, and to report at Le Bourget, the great Paris aviation centre.
Before its arrival in the Somme the escadrille had always been quartered in towns and the life of the pilots was all that could be desired in the way of comforts. We had, as a result, come to believe that we would wage only a de luxe war, and were unprepared for any other sort of campaign. The introduction to the Somme was a rude awakening.
And he is so sincere and natural in it. He has no conception of the dramatic possibilities of a situation something to be profoundly thankful for in the commander of an escadrille de chasse. Situations are dramatic enough, tense enough, without one's taking thought of the fact. He might have stood there, watch in hand, counting off the seconds.
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