Hope Takes Flight (24 page)

Gavin never knew how he made it back to the base. When he got out of the plane, the mechanics came running over. “Where are you hit, Lieutenant?” one of them cried.

“Leave me alone,” Gavin whispered. “Get away from me.”

The mechanics watched as he walked stiffly away and then turned to inspect the plane. “They got him pretty good,” one of them said. “But I don't see any holes around the cockpit.”

“What's wrong with him, then? I never saw him like this before.”

“Neither have I, but something's got into him. He looks just like Thompson did. Remember? He was a great pilot until he nearly got killed that time over Ypres. Never was any good after that.” He looked at the retreating figure of Lieutenant Gavin Stuart and shook his head. “I hope the lieutenant don't turn yellow like he did. He's too good a man for that.”

Gavin did not go to the barracks. He knew that with one look at his face, his fellow pilots would know something was wrong. Instead, he turned and walked toward a clump of trees that sheltered one side of the aerodrome. It had been left, probably through someone's mistake, for more than one pilot had nearly crashed into them.

He entered the grove and leaned with his back against a tree, and the trembling began. He shook all over. Finally he slumped down in the snow, and buried his face in his arms. There Gavin Stuart cried as he had not cried since he had been a very small boy.

N
o one knew better than General Erich Ludendorff that, unless some miracle occurred, his country was doomed to defeat. Early on a cold day in 1918, he sat staring at the maps, a feeling of hopelessness apparent in the slump of his shoulders. Although the man standing beside him, Kaiser Wilhelm, did not have the military knowledge to understand the reasons why, he knew well that the war was not going as he had planned. The two men had been up for hours, exploring every possibility, and both of them were gloomy and unsmiling.

Finally Ludendorff smashed the map with his large fist. “It's the Americans! There's no way to stop them or slow them down! We'll be facing a million of them by year's end! They can't win the war by themselves, but they'll tip the odds against us.”

Kaiser Wilhelm had no choice but to agree. He was a man who had been brought up to believe that Germany could never lose, but he was well aware of the staggering losses his nation had sustained. Still, he had a shred of the vision that had caused him to lead his country into the war. “Yes, that's true, General. But now that Communism is broken, we'll have all the valuable lands in the East! And we'll have many divisions to ship from the eastern front to the western front.”

“Yes, sir.” Ludendorff nodded. “But how do we play our hand?” He stared at the map and then began to speak in a professorial tone. “There are two choices—both very promising and both very dangerous. First, we can play it safe. We can dig into such strong positions that the Allies may lose hope and come to the conference table.”

Kaiser Wilhelm shook his head. “We would have to return all of the territory we've won in France and Belgium. But,” he added thoughtfully, “we might keep Alsace-Lorraine.”

“Yes, we could do that. The only problem is that the Allies might decide to dig in and tie our armies down while Allied shipping does its work. The blockade,” he said grimly, “has been more effective than we thought it might be. Hunger has Berlin gripped in an iron cage.”

“What is our other choice?”

Ludendorff hesitated. He had thought long over this, agonized over it, and had counted well the cost. Still, there was no other way. “The other choice,” he said slowly, “is to launch an all-out offensive to win the war before the Americans get here in power. And this, too, is dangerous—very dangerous!”

Kaiser Wilhelm stared at Ludendorff. “What would happen if the offensive failed?” the Kaiser asked, almost timidly.

Ludendorff stared at the map, then turned a pair of iron-gray eyes on his leader. “Then,” he snapped, “Germany must perish!”

The result of that meeting was that Germany would throw the iron dice and gamble everything on a quick victory. Win or lose, the war would be over by the close of 1918.

The buildup of one of the largest and most secret operations in history went on throughout the winter, although Ludendorff kept his preparations under a tight lid of secrecy. Roads, railroad lines, and airfields were built all along the front so as not to arouse Allied suspicions about one area in particular. Troop trains and air convoys moved constantly, but only at night, with the lights out. Troops were marched along back roads in darkness, hiding in forests in the daylight when Allied patrols were most active. Artillery positions were dug in at night and camouflaged. Mountains of shells were accumulated and placed near the guns under camouflage nets.

Before dawn on Thursday, March 21, 1918, preparations were complete. Three and a half million Germans, many trained as storm troopers, crouched in their trenches, waiting. A ground fog, promising to hide the assault wave during their dash across no-man's-land, shrouded most of the western front.

Men stared tensely as the luminous dials of their wristwatches ticked off the minutes. Shells were slid into the firing chambers of cannons with a soft swish. Silently the long gun muzzles were raised, moved from side to side, then steadied. Artillerymen stuffed wads of cotton into their ears.

At exactly 4:40
A.M.,
Ludendorff unleashed the heaviest bombardment in the history of the world. Six thousand cannon opened fire at once along the Somme and continued firing for five hours without letup. The British replied with twenty-five hundred guns of their own.

The ground trembled as if in an earthquake, and the effect was paralyzing. Shells, hundreds of them at a time, landed in straight rows, five yards apart, the edges of their craters touching to form series of neat figure-eights. Command posts vanished into smoking shell holes. Trenches caved in on the inhabitants, becoming mass graves. Ammunition dumps roared and crackled like strings of firecrackers. Barbed-wire entanglements were shredded.

At 10:00
A.M.,
whistles blew and waves of storm troopers, led by flamethrowers, ran from their trenches. Minutes later, they were attacking the British in their trenches, shouting, shooting, slashing through the Somme defenses. Behind them, the regular infantry surged forward to mop up and destroy any remaining strong points. For the first time since the war began, an advance was measured not in yards, but in miles. Within three days the Germans had jabbed a salient—a wedge—forty miles into the Allied front.

Ludendorff and the High Command were jubilant. Their gamble, so it seemed, had paid off, as the Allied line collapsed, and seemed almost at the point of being broken.

“Now we shall see!” General Ludendorff exclaimed exultantly. “We will teach them what the German soldier can do!”

The members of the Lafayette Escadrille had looked forward with eager anticipation to the time when they would be attached to an American Air Force in France. However, when that time finally came, it was a day of bitter disappointment for all of them.

Bill Thaw was enthusiastic about the news that at last the slow-moving brass hats were sending a delegation of high-rankers to examine the Lafayette Escadrille pilots. “Just a matter of time now, chaps!” he said, beaming. “We'll be flying under the Stars and Stripes before you know it!”

The examiners came, and all of the pilots took physical examinations, including urinalysis, blood tests, and a long series of rather ridiculous physical demonstrations. And the next day, when the men were called together, a chastened Bill Thaw stood up to say, “Bad news. The Board decided that most of us are not fit enough to make an aviator.”

A cry of amazement went up from all the flyers, but it was Gavin who said, “Why, that's the craziest thing I ever heard! We shoot down Germans every day!”

“I know. All I'm doing is passing along what they said,” Thaw explained mournfully. Then he mentioned Dud Hill's blind eye, his own bad vision and crippled arm, Lufbery's inability to walk a crack backwards, Dolan's tonsils, Hank Jones's flat feet.

“So we're just a bunch of broken-down, crippled misfits?” Genet exclaimed in disgust. “How do they think we score kills if we're in such bad shape?”

“I don't know,” Thaw said. “But I'm afraid it's bad news. And I might as well be honest with you. It's the end of the Lafayette Escadrille.”

In December, the Escadrille had been ordered to the field of La Noblette, and all the pilots presented their applications to the French Army for release, expecting to receive immediate commissions into the American Army. Their releases were officially granted, but no commissions arrived.

From December 1, 1917, through February 18, 1918, the men flew as civilians in the uniform of the French Army, and during this time, Gavin Stuart had had his hardest struggle. He watched as the Escadrille was broken up. Thaw and Lufbery were given commissions in the American force. There was a sprinkling of captaincies, but most of the flyers received commissions as first and second lieutenants and were placed under the commands of newly arrived “ninety-day wonders,” men who were full of ambition and disciplinary theories, but had never fired a gun at the enemy.

During this time, Gavin grew very close to Edmund Genet, the smallest and softest-speaking of all the Escadrille flyers, and a direct descendant of the Edmund Genet who was the ambassador the French Revolutionary Government sent to the United States in 1792. Genet did not have the appearance of a fighting man, but Gavin had come to know him very well. When the Lafayette Escadrille had begun breaking up, the two of them talked it over seriously.

“You're not happy about going into the American Army, are you Gavin?” Genet asked.

“No. None of us are going to get a fair break. They're gonna put their own guys in whatever planes are available.”

Edmund, a chunky little figure, topped by a thatch of short-cropped blond hair above the round, pink-cheeked face of an infant, pondered this for a moment. He still didn't look a day over sixteen, with his peach-bloom complexion showing little traces of ever having met a razor, and his stubby little nose. There was always a constant expression of pleased surprise at the wonders of the world in the wide-set blue eyes. Now he said with some excitement, “Let's join the French Air Force, Gavin! They'll be glad to have us. I've already talked to some of the commanders. We can stay together.”

Gavin made his decision at once. “Sure! That's the thing to do!”

And so it was that on February 18, when the Lafayette Escadrille passed out of existence as a French unit, lock, stock and barrel, and became the 103rd Pursuit Squadron of the American Air Service, Edmund Genet and Gavin Stuart were the only two members who did not join. Instead, they were attached to a French unit under the command of Lieutenant Claude Demond, a tall distinguished man with black eyes and hair to match.

The French unit was short of flyers, so the two young men were immediately thrown into the battle that was raging on the ground beneath—Ludendorff's last offensive—that was eating up men from both armies.

Every day was a life-and-death struggle, and Gavin grew very close to young Edmund, who became almost like a younger brother to him. They covered the bare walls of their room with corrugated cardboard strips, and Edmund painted vivid imaginative scenes of air combats between French and German planes all over the place.

“Don't we see enough fighting?” Gavin complained one day as he lay back on his bunk. He was staring at Edmund, who was busy painting a French Spad.

Edmund grinned at him and threw down his brush. “All right. Let's go see if we can find anything to eat. I'm hungry.” He was always hungry, and it was a miracle to Gavin that such a small young fellow could stuff so many groceries down his throat and never gain an ounce.

“Thanks, but I don't want anything.”

Edmund took one quick look at Gavin and came over and sat on his friend's bunk, facing him. “What's wrong? You haven't been yourself, not for a long time now.” Edmund, young as he was, had lived under intense pressure and had come to recognize the symptoms of a pilot who was ready to crack under the strain. He had been concerned about his roommate, of whom he had grown genuinely fond. “Maybe it's time for you to ask for a leave.”

Gavin leaned his head back against the wall and shut his eyes. He had never told anyone about the “vision” he had had, and it sat heavily on him, weighing him down. Night after night he had relived the scene. He was tempted to unload to his young friend. But he knew that Edmund would never understand such a thing, so he merely passed it off. “No, I'm okay. Just tired, I guess.”

Frowning, Edmund decided not to push the matter. “Well,” he said, “according to the word, one of us can have a leave day after tomorrow, and the other, next week. Tell you what. You take the first one, go scout out whatever can be found. I'll stay here and keep the war going.” He smiled gently at his friend. “We'll be all right, Gavin. God hasn't brought us this far to let us be killed.”

But he was wrong. The next day when Genet went up for the second probe of the day—he had already done an early two-hour morning show—he seemed so bushed that Gavin warned, “You've done enough, Edmund. Let someone else go.”

Tired as he was, Genet's eyes were twinkling as he said, “No, I'll do it. You old fellows go take your nap, and let us youngsters take care of the fighting.”

Gavin looked down at his young friend, desperately wishing that Genet would listen to him. He put his hand on the younger man's shoulder. “You're tired. That's when you make mistakes. Let Demond do it. You and I can take an early break.”

But Genet only laughed. “You're a regular mother hen! Don't worry about me. I'll be all right.” He hesitated for a moment, then clapped Gavin on the shoulder. “It's you and me. I never had a brother…until now. So we'll take care of each other. But this'll be easy…a piece of cake.”

Genet turned and climbed into his plane and soon disappeared behind a cloud in the sky. Gavin slowly turned away, and for the rest of the afternoon walked around the field, idly killing time. But he became more agitated as the afternoon wore on, for Genet's mission was not supposed to have taken so long. When Lieutenant Demond came looking for him, Gavin knew at once that something was wrong. The lieutenant's face was fixed and his mouth was set in a bitter line.

“Is it Edmund?” Gavin asked, dreading the answer.

“Yes. I'm afraid so. An observer just got back and saw him go down not far from our lines.…” Demond hesitated. Knowing of the friendship between the two men, he said gently, “He's dead, Gavin…hit by a shell splinter, we think. He fell with his motor going full speed. The observers who got to the spot say he never had a chance.” He shook his head sadly. “Poor little dreamer! And what a fine young man! He gave his life for his ideals.”

Gavin felt as if the earth had been yanked out from under him. He had not realized until that moment how much it had meant to have such a friend, a dear friend. Now he had nobody. He was all alone.