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Updated: May 23, 2025
The gale tore at my hair and distended my cheeks, the turf slipped away beneath me as smooth as green water in the speed of his mad attempt to force the machine into the air. Slowly and with extreme care I edged my way inch by inch along the fuselage toward the main planes and the pilot's seat. Casting back a glance I saw the hangars, a mere white bar across the plain.
It is the nearest thing to animate life which man has created. In the air an airplane ceases to be a mere piece of dumb mechanism; it seems to throb with feeling, and is capable not only of primary guidance and control, but actually of expressing a pilot's temperament. The lungs of the machine its engines are the crux of man's mechanical wisdom and skill.
There were no signal-lights along the shore in those days, and no search-lights on the vessels; everything was blind; and on a dark, misty night, in a river full of snags and shifting sandbars and changing shores, a pilot's judgment had to be founded on absolute certainty."
From a very familiar case beside the pilot's seat Ross gathered up a collection of disks, sorted through them hastily for one which bore a certain symbol on its covering. There was only one of those. Slapping the rest back into their container, Ross pressed a button on the control board. Again his guess paid off! Another disk was exposed as a small panel slid back.
The pilot's instinct ruled her; gave her tireless eyes and sturdy hands. Surely she had never been weary; never would be, so long as it was hers to keep the car going. She had driven perhaps six miles when she reached a hamlet called St. Klopstock. On the bedraggled mud-and-shanty main street a man was loading crushed rock into a truck.
Philip closed them again, to ascertain what were the man's intentions: he found that he gradually dragged out the chain, and, when the relic was clear, attempted to pass the whole over his head, evidently to gain possession of it. Upon this attempt Philip started up and seized him by the waist. "Indeed!" cried Philip, with an indignant look, as he released the chain from the pilot's hand.
A clock shaped like a pilot's wheel, a boyhood property which had marked the time of twenty years, finally chimed the thin, tin stroke of eleven and after a swimming, nebulous interval, twelve. He glanced up each time with his swollen eyes, and then almost automatically out to the wall telephone in the hall opposite the open door. But he did not move.
He was first sent down to Monsieur Odervie for a lunch after he had given the course, and the ship continued on her way. The cook was very glad to meet a compatriot; and, as he was getting dinner, he had several nice dishes, from which he treated his new friend. But the pilot's services were soon needed in the pilot-house. He spoke a little English, consisting mainly of nautical terms.
The major crossed to speak to him and after they conferred for a moment, the major beckoned Ross with a crooked finger. Ross trailed the officer into an inner room lined with lockers. From one of the lockers the major pulled a suit like the pilot's, and began to measure it against Ross. "All right," he snapped. "Climb into this! We haven't all night." Ross climbed into the suit.
A defensive patrol was operating between Albert and the trenches. We joined it for half an hour, at the end of which I heard a "Halloa!" from the speaking-tube. "What's up now?" I asked. "Going to have a look at the war," was the pilot's reply. Before I grasped his meaning he had shut off the engine and we were gliding towards the trenches.
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