Perfect Gentle Knights of the Air

Charles Lindbergh. His Life. By Dale Van Every and Morris D. Tracey. (Appleton. $2.) Tier United Press of America are to be congratulated on the

speed and thoroughness with which they have collected and published information concerning that charming boy, Charles Lindbergh. The average Englishman has still a wholly false conception of the country of which the gallant Colonel is such an illustrious son. The fact is, St. Louis has other sons besides the be-spectacled, loud-voiced Babbitts whom we sometimes imagine are representative types. There is no such animal as a representative American, but Lindbergh, quiet, unostentatious, greatly daring and with that casual streak in his nature which we all admire, is a lithe six foot of fact and a better interpreter of his country than a million words of fiction or literary appraisal.

On the night of his great adventure, when he went to the " movies," and returning at midnight told the night porter of the Garden City Hotel to call him at 2.15 he set the keynote of his immortal theme. The Spirit of St. Louis was sign and symbol of the spirit of man ; her silver-grey wings in the dawnlight the oriflamme of our war against time and space and fear. Over all the world flashed the story of his start. Nova Scotia saw him ; Cape Breton ; Newfoundland ; then he was alone in the grey North Atlantic. A hundred million hearts must have quickened when the news came from Queenstown that he had been sighted, true as a bee to his line, after that night of loneliness and fog.

His thirty-three hours of flying—alone with his sandwiches and bottle of water—have set him in a place apart from all the other brave men who have done and dared. He has Viking blood in his veins, but more important still, his mother is of the stuff heroes are made of. While Lindbergh was in the North Atlantic she continued teaching in her Detroit school. She asked that no news of the flight should be given her in school hours. In the evening she heard that her only son had

flown the Atlantic. Messages from the President and Royalties came from far and near. She felt that they belonged to Charlie and not to her. And " Somebody tell mother " was tini first request that Lindbergh made that tumultuous night,' when the crowds of Le Bourget were all but smothering hini. Both have resolutely shunned publicity as far as possible.' It is good, therefore, to find such a fine record told with a restraint that does honour to American journalism. Everyone should read this book. Every boy should have it. Although Colonel Lindbergh is not an Englishman, he has a triple claim to our regard, for he is a great pilot, a splendid ambassadoi, and a good sportsman.

I am conscious of making a bold claim when I say that War Birds (John Hamilton, 15s.) is one of the best books yet written about the War. It is the diary of an anony- mous aviator, a jolly American boy, whom we trace through his fights and junketings in France, to a terrible August day when he knows that he has lost his nerve. Every word rings true. I have put it on my shelf beside Mr. Bott's An Airman's Outings. Colonel Lawrence's masterpiece, Revolt in the Desert, is better written than either of these : indeed it stands by itself for tense descriptive power and sheer interest—as if Shakespeare had kept the diary of Drake ; but War Birds is more human.

The book opens with the author leaving Mineola. He makes the following resolutions in his diary : " I am not going to lose my temper any more—I fight too much. . . . I am not going to take any unnecessary chances. I want to die well. I don't want to be a hero. Too often they are all clay from the feet up, but I want to die as a man should." Then comes almost the only touch of sentiment, written on a September night at sea, on his way to death : " There is a full moon to-night and the sea is beautiful. It makes me sad. It makes me ache inside for something, I don't know what. I guess it's a little loving I want. There are twenty nurses aboard, but they are all dated up for the rest of the voyage. The wind is rising and whining. I shall always carry this picture in my mind of the damp decks and masts rearing along under the stars. I wish I could soak it all up and keep it. God, I'm young, and if I have wonderful memories when I get old, I will be happy." But his memories are for us alone, and for history.

Next we find him at Christ Church, Oxford, in a room with three other cadets. Here are his irreverent notes on the House :-

" Our barracks are a million years old, I know, because it took that long to cool off this temperature. The stone is crumbling away. Wolsey and Henry VIII built it or had something to do with it. I haven't found out whether they got fired from it or gave money to it. Either one makes a man famous. We have champagne for our meals at $2.10 a bottle. We get the vintage of 1904. I am full of it now and that's why I can't write very well. Everyone over here is so damn polite. I know now why they think of us as savages. This is the most charming country I ever dreamed of. Yesterday the old fellow, the Dean of Christ Church, took us all thru the church. The architecture over here is Moorish and is the work of Sir Christopher Wren. I would love to know all the old English gentlemen who spent or misspent their youth here at Oxford and slept in this very room. I'll bet they love the wasted part of their youth best."

There was no candy for sale at Oxford except in small lots; and no regular barber chairs, but on the whole he seems to have liked the place and been liked. Life was not all drinking

and parties. - On January 28th he took his altitude test and on February 9th he flies for the first time in a Sopwith Pup—" Gosh, what a thrill ! " The following week he flies a Spad. Almost every day he notes that some of his friends or acquaintances are killed ; he himself grows in favour with the air and with the authorities. In the spring he learns that he is to join Colonel Bishop's famous Circus and go to France. Somebody lends him and his friends a house in Berkeley Square where they have a perfectly marvellous time. " I have been spending the last few days with Billie," he writes. " I wish I had met her sooner." That was the late Miss

Carleton.

And now for France, where our author intends " to get down to real serious work." Here is a comment as true to-day as when it was written :-

" If I was running the War the first thing I would do would be to get control of the air, no matter what it cost. That's what's saved England all these centuries, control of the seas. Thci Air FOic'e would do the same thine."

From May to the end of August it is a mad and grimly merry story of bacchanals and heroes, of superhuman courage and amazing orgies. But if any adult reader of either sex feels shocked, I can only feel sorry for him or her. The drinking in the Flying Corps was regrettable, but so was the War. We can forgive much to boys who did things like this :—

" Mannock is dead, the greatest pilot of the war. But his death was worthy of him. Inglis had been doing a lot of fighting but had never gotten a Hun. But he tried hard and Mannock told him that he would take him out alone and get him a Hun. So just the two of them went out late in the afternoon. Mannock picked up a two-seater over Estaires and went down after him. Mannock has a special method of attacking a two-seater. He takes them from the front at an angle and then goes under them if he misses his first burst. It is very hard to do but is unquestionably the best method. Instead of going under and getting him for himself, he held his fire and turned the Hun and held him for Inglis. Inglis got him and they started back, but they were low down. Mannock got hit by machine gun fire from the ground just like Richthofen and dove right on into the ground. Inglis went back and flew right down to the ground and saw the wreck and is sure he's dead."

A few days later :- " I got shot up by a damn two-seater yesterday and then got dived on by a couple of ambitious Fokkers. My tail plane looked like a Swiss cheese."

These stories of air-fighting are Homeric. Perhaps they are more, the greatest true stories ever told, for man has done nothing in all history of a sustained and reckless gallantry to equal the fighting in the skies of France.

We come to the inescapable and indeed fittingly tragic conclusion :-

" August 17th.—I'm not feeling very well to-day. I fought Huns all night in my sleep and after two hours of real fighting to-day I feel all washed out."

Now the author knows his nerve is failing :-

" When I go out to get my plane my feet are like lead—I am just barely able to drag them after me. But as soon as I take off I am all right again. That is, I feel all right, tho' I know I am too reckless. Last week I actually tried to ram a Hun. I was in a tight place and it was the only thing I could do. He didn't have the nerve to stand the gaff and turned and I got him. I poured both guns into him with fiendish glee and stuck to him, tho' three of them were on my tail."

The last entry is about luck. His charms are Billie's stocking over the nose of his engine, the solitary sixpence he had left after paying for the fierce midnights and famishing morrows of his stay in England, and a piece of his first crash. " They seem to take care of me all right, though I am not superstitious." And here the diary ends, for he was shot down when fighting twenty miles within the German lines. The Red Cross have marked his grave, but his words shall

" aspire When pyramids as men Are burnt i' the funerall fire."

F. Y-B.