A Bit of Propaganda: An Adventure in Practical Psychology
WE did n’t go in for much of that sort of work in our escadrille. Most of the men were quite satisfied to make their two gun-spotting flights a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, and call it a day’s work. There was no jealousy or over-competition, for each took his turn as it came, and no one was allowed to go up without his orders.
So everything was lovely until the G.Q.G. opened their Bureau of Enemy Psychology. Then they started to swamp us with clever ideas. Pamphlets began to arrive, bundles at a time — paper ammunition, intended to be ra ined down on the heads of the benighted Boche until he broke beneath the weight. And they were weighty, too. I could read a bit of German once, and I appreciated their appeal more than did my French comrades. There was, for example, a fake news-sheet purporting to emanate from Berne. This gave all the latest, news of the Allied victories, coupled with most pessimistic statements of certain German Socialists. There was a similar page from Holland, the country that furnished the sand and cement for so many Boche forts in Flanders. The Holland news, as set forth in the Something Tageblatt, showed clearly that Wilhelm and his associates had been operating the business at a loss and were about to be sold up. Then there was a dainty little card printed in tricolors, that touched the heart by its human appeal. It was for the common soldier of Hun extraction, unused to involved arguments and economic theories. This was brief and clear. Soi-disant, it was a friendly litt le letter written by one common-soldierof-Hun-extraction to all the rest of his comrades at present under arms. He was a prisoner in France, brave fellow, and so kindly was he treated by his captors, so generously was he considered, that he wanted to pass on the good word to all his fellow Boches. If there were any among them who felt ground down under the heel of the oppressor (meaning Germany), they could easily come over to a land of liberty, of victorious democracy (meaning France). And the way was clear. They had only to steal out of their trenches at night, crawl to within hearing distance of the French trenches, lift their two hands to heaven, and give the international password, ’Kamerad, ne tirez pas!’ This was pronounced, ‘Nuh tiray pah.’ The charming picture of the deserter’s reception in France made me feel like deserting to France myself; but I was already there.
As I said before, we did not use much of this ammunition. It came in firingcharges of five pounds, and took up so much room in the observer’s seat that he could n’t do his regular work. No one wanted to make a special trip over the lines, so the bundles slowly built themselves up into a small monument in the rear of the hangar, unconsidered by all men except the cook, who started his matutinal fire with them.
In February, 1918, the escadrille arrived at Fimes, where the Front was still tranquil. A few artillery reglages and a photographic review of the whole sector was the first week’s routine. There were very few Boche machines to be seen, and we looked forward to a quiet month which would give us plenty of time to install ourselves comfortably. Our last camp in Flanders had last ed six months, so we expected at least as long a stay at Fimes. Every morning the camp woke to the sound of hammers. Pilots and machine-gunners spent their idle hours in putting together haphazard furniture and shelves. Each evening was the opportunity for the needy to fare abroad in search of planks and window-frames from the ruined houses in the valley. These necessary odds and ends we could not acquire in the daytime; but once they were in our possession, they were irredeemable. Our quarters became ornate with all the flotsam and jet sam of a bombarded and deserted village.
The beginning of our sorrows was the finding, in a ruined paintshop, of t hree quarters of a roll of wall-paper. The lucky finder wove with if a gorgeous background of purple poppies upon two walls of his room. Envy and emulation seized us all. Bare boards for walls were no longer de rigueur, and every sort of material appeared to cover the honest pine planks. Barault had sheets of print ed calico which he bought in the town; but this was paid for and was not considered either clever or fitting. Rehan tacked up several yards of fairly clean straw-matting, which kept out the winter breezes effectively. Another pilot used the painted burlap concealment envelope of a hangar. This was so inflammable that we insisted on keeping it soaked with water, and so, of course, he had to take it down. For my room-mate and myself there was nothing left except the white canvass landing T, which was large and clean. But although the T was never put out on the landing-ground, we had not the courage to requisition it. It was too much like stealing the ligne de vol itself from the headquarters office, w here it was reported to be kept in a silver case. We complained that the ‘crawlers,’ the caporals in the bureaux and the other non-flying nonentities, were always the first served when it came to a question of house-furnishings. Being groundlings, they were evidently entitled to all that was found on the ground, such as roofing-paper, pine planks, and barrack-lamps. We, the fliers, the youth and beauty of the outfit, were entitled only to what we could find in the air. But Article 22 of t he Military Code, Chacun se debrouille comme il peut, was now cited. This reflection was responsible for my papering our room with several pounds of the literature intended for German uplift.
It stuck well, thanks to a flour-paste made by our cook. Before the war he was the head cook in the Maritime Restaurant at Marseilles. His paste was delicious to the nose, and the entire barrack partook of it for twenty-four hours. But the work was well done. Along the north wall were twenty copies of Ludendorff’s character, in black and white, mostly black. The rest of the space was taken up with Allied victories in Switzerland, trimmed with a neat row of the red-white-and-blue appeals from one deserter to his distant comrades still under the yoke. My comrades declared it exquisite; the officer observers said it was very practical indeed; and the captain thought it a bit exaggerated. Then the commandant of the group of escadrilles happened in to see how his pilots were lodged, and he was the only one genuinely interested. ‘Yes,’ said he, ‘that reminds me. This morning we received another bundle of propaganda to be dropped in the enemy lines as you dropped the others. I have sent it to your escadrille, for I suppose this work will be of interest to you personally. The service is intensely practical and comprises little risk. You will take up the pamphlets with you the first day there is a strong west wind, and drop them in such fashion that the winds will distribute them in the five kilometres immediately behind the German trenches. You have n’t much work these days, and this will keep your planes in working order.’
Before I could reply he was gone.
I wanted to tell him that I would do my part in getting rid of his important pamphlets, ‘in the same way we got rid of the others.’ As for our being idle, we had our mess-room to furnish with our own hands and five stoves to put up. But the pamphlets came that evening. They were ‘of interest to me personally’ because they comprised about twenty pounds of Wilson’s speech!
I had too often used my lucky nationality to gain favors that gave me advantages over the others. For two years I was allowed to celebrate our sacred national holidays, such as the Fourt h of July and Thanksgiving, with a short furlough t o Paris, where all good Americans go when they die. I had used my ignorance of the French language and regulations to allow me to pass where passing was forbidden. I had taken liberties, as an American volunteer, which would have put a French conscript in prison. True, my comrades bore me no grudge because of my racial superiority, and my Turkish cigarettes, from Connecticut and Virginia, were much in favor in a tobaccoless land. But for once I tried to make them forget these distinctions.
It was quite evident to the entire mess that I was fatally indicated for the chore: a two-hours flight in a heavy wind, a most uninteresting flight, which meant the loss of my turn for a really exciting discussion of targets with the heavy guns around Corbeny Wood. My argument was that such very special work was fit only for a much older pilot; that I had never done such a job; that it was a useless stunt and should be performed by the latest arrived pilot at the mess; that my plane was out of order and useless for three days; and last, that I did not want to lose my turn at t he regular work. But I was crushed under their combined protests. I was American and so was Wilson’s speech, and the two of us must go together. I conceded the point, so strong was their logic. For Washington’s Birthday was approaching, which I hoped to present as a sort of American Quatorze Juillet, to be spent in Paris.
The following afternoon the weather was favorable for the expedition. One of the younger lieutenant observers went with me. He carried with him, in the rear seat, forty pounds of eloquence printed in German. The pages were done up in half-pound rolls fastened with an elastic. Our other weapons were two Lewis guns on a revolving turret. The west wind was behind us, driving us chez eux. Opposite, we could see the Plateau de Californie stretching long and raw to the east. The plateau was riven with galleries, of which we could see the entrances and the smoke that wreathed up from internal fires. Troglodytes lived in those caves, a race of men whose manner of living was that of their forbears who fought the cave bear and the sabre-toothed tiger. Where the engineers were digging their mines and countermines, they disturbed the bones of these earlier tunnelers of the clay, and mused on the circumstance which even in that day had forced men to hide themselves underground from their enemies. And many of these fighters with gunpowder and steel left their own remains within the hill. Some five hundred years hence, in a fut ure period of dispute, some soldier of the Nth Engineers, piercing the plateau in his subterranean tank, will find the bones of the men who first captured the heights from the Boches. And he will smile as he recognizes the relics of primitive war, the puny guns and digging tools that depended upon the strength of a man’s arm. He will think, ‘We are progressing.'
As I sailed overhead in my plane I also thought, ‘We are progressing.’ It was warfare in the ultimate degree. Instead of killing our enemy by sudden dismemberment, we rained down upon him the power of the. printed word, to unjoint his moral strength and dislocate his will to resist . It was a triumph of reason over matter. But the idea was not entirely new. Several centuries before Christ an Assyrian king laid siege to the Egyptian city of Bubastes, of which the patron divinity was the Sacred Cat, and in which all other cats were worshiped for his sake. But the men of Bubastes were content to rest behind their solid walls and refused to try the issue of a doubtful battle. Whereat the Assyrians gathered together all the cats in the surrounding country and with them made propaganda in front of the Egyptian walls. The horsemen rode up and down, each with a mewing and struggling feline tied by the tail to his saddle-bow. Thus the Egyptians were compelled to come out and fight the desecrators, and fell victims to their rashness.
Behind me the observer was slipping the elastics from the rolls. Each roll, as he loosened its fastening, he threw downward so that it would not burst into a cloud of flying sheets before it was well clear of the control wires. We marched the air-lanes up and down, three miles behind our own first lines. The steady wind caught the message and floated it eastward to the enemy. It was a slow job, and we untidied the clean sky for two miles north and south. Five hundred metres beneath, we saw the fluttering leaflets we had dropped on each previous trip. At first I thought I was looking at flocks of swallows, whose darting w ings twinkled in the sunlight; but it was only our own work going on beneath us.
We were quite alone. There were no Huns in the air to disturb us, and our own machines were not yet up. Even the ‘Archies’ let us pass unannounced. Generally the Boche battery in Corbeny Wood spoke to us as we went by. If they saw us to-day they must have thought us game unworthy of their powder. If, on returning, I could only say, ‘They shot well to-day over Corbeny,’ or, ‘Another hole to patch in the left wing!’ I should have been happy. But there was nothing to justify our carrying weapons on the aerial highway.
A cloud-bank formed in front of us, and I dropped a quarter of a mile to avoid it. The paper ammunition had all been shot off and we turned downward and homeward. I had my eyes on the oil-gauge w hen my motor began to give snorts of uneasiness and to buck.
I worked the throttle to feel its heart, but could not coax it back into its accustomed stride. It snorted louder and pulled more feebly. I had two more wooded valleys to cross ere I could afford to slide down the long gravity road that ended on the home landing-ground. To land in the woods meant a broken machine and no dinner — and we were dropping fast. I did everything the inventor of the motor had provided for me to do. I opened the auxiliary gasolene tank; I pumped the auxiliary gasolene pump; I turned the auxiliary ignition switch, and I wished ardently for an auxiliary motor.
When still half a mile high and home not yet in sight, I decided to give up and come down before I was forced to come down like Davy Crockett’s coon. There was no place to land with any hope of saving the plane, but I was angry with the cranky machine and wanted to save my own precious neck. Below was a dark-green patch that I recognized for a little wood of dwarf pines, closely planted and only ten feet high. With a dead motor I could reach the pines, skim over their tops as over the daisies on a flying-field, and come to rest t here when the plane lost its speed. This meant an insignificant ten-foot fall to earth, the fall broken by the treetops. And so I planned my descent. I made my last turn while still four hundred yards high, and sped the length of the wood, to be sure to touch near the middle of it. My observer was now showing unusual interest in the piloting of the plane — a thing rare in observers.
At last the sharp pine-tops were skimming beneath my wheels. The plane was leveled out and losing speed slowly. I saw clearly how the smash was going to wreck the poor old bus completely, and leave us without a scratch or a bruise. The swift moment of waiting was sublime. Curtius about to leap into the gulf, Joan of Arc mounting to the stake, Arnold Winkelreid facing the Austrian spears — I had all the sensations of these. And then chance spoiled the climax; the gulf closed before the horseman leaped; the fire refused to burn; the spears missed the heroic breast; and my undeserving plane dropped heavily and unharmed in a clearing in the wood, a clearing so small that I had not seen it!
We dismounted, my passenger and I. His was the mood of a man escaped from imminent, death, and I took my cue at once. I became the experienced old pilot, accustomed to making forced landings in woodland clearings sixty yards square! ‘Bon Dieu de mille bonsDieux!’ I panted, I was afraid for a moment that I’d miss it.’ This with the accents of recent mental stress.
The cause of the motor-trouble w-as the cause of the expedition itself: a bit of propaganda, a bit of Wilson’s speech, that had flown into the internal working of my motor when I ducked under a cloud and into a shower of my ow n paper. The motor had caught a couple of sheets between the cylinders, and the mouth of an exhaust-valve had chew ed up an oily wad of it and ruined its digestion therewith.
This bizarre accident was kept secret. The eight escadrilles on our field knew of it, and my friends in Paris; but no one else. We feared that if the Huns heard of it, they might use the idea and make the sky untenable with a continual paper barrage. I write this account during the Armistice.
We reached home that night two hours late for dinner, but not too late to find sympathetic ears for my wonderful tale of pilot-craft. I told it in full, and even added that I had long had my eye on that sixty-yard clearing as an emergency landing-ground. They had to believe me, for the field was there and the plane posed in the middle of it.
Rehan was doubtful. He wanted me to explain how I planned to get the plane out again from t he clearing. There was a runway of sixty yards and a tenfoot obstacle at the end of it. A dirigible could clear it , but not an aeroplane.
I proved to them mathematically and aerodynamically that a plane could get out of any place it could get into — provided, of course, that the pilot knew his business. Rehan promised to come out with me on the morrow and watch me do it. He had been driving planes only three years, and he wanted to learn from me, he said!
That same night the wind rose and the gale howled and the trees of the forest bent beneath the storm. My plane was overturned and torn into detached pieces by the tempest, so Rehan was disappointed. I felt the loss less keenly myself, for the result would have been the same in either case. Besides, not every pilot sees his plane a mangled wreck, himself not in it !
So ended the launching of propaganda by our escadrille. It was put down as dangerous and unprofitable and to be done only by volunteers. No one volunteered. We often calculated the probable results of this one attempt at it. Whenever the big guns made unusual noises at night, we got in the habit of saying, ‘That’s the propaganda; you’ve got the Boches aroused to their danger.’ And when the nights were quiet, one remarked, ‘ They scarcely resist at all these days, since Wilson’s speech got among them.’
The Big Show is over now, and perhaps this bit of propaganda did as much to bring about the happy ending as I myself did to bring down my plane safely in the middle of the wood. In any case, it’s a good story for a man’s grandchildren.