Eastern Nights:And Flights: a Record of Oriental Adventure
And Flights: a Record of Oriental Adventure
9781465560728
pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Most of us who were at close grips with the Great War will remember the habit of speculation about life on the far side of the front. Somewhere beyond the frontier of trenches, we realized, were our opposite numbers—infantrymen, gunners, aviators, staff officers, mess orderlies, generals, captains, lance-corporals—each according to character, rank, and duties, and to the position he occupied by reason of ability, courage, initiative, old age, self-advertisement, or wire-pulling. We saw them through a glass, darkly—a glass that, being partly concave, partly convex, and almost impenetrable throughout, showed us our opposite numbers as distorted reflections of ourselves. We knew well that a journey through, round, or over this glass would take us into an unnatural world where we should be negative instead of positive, passive instead of active, useless scrap-iron instead of working parts of a well-constructed machine. Yet we never considered the possibility of being obliged, in that unreal world, to live a life of impotence. Our companions, now, might have the bad luck to be dragged there; but our sense of normality would not let us reckon with such an unusual happening in our own case. And then, perhaps, one fine day or night found us isolated in an attack, or shot down in an air fight; and we would be in the topsy-turvy country of captivity. Some of us, who passed into this country from the curious East, tumbled head over heels upon adventures fantastic as those of any imaginative explorer of the wonderland Through the Looking Glass of fancy. We were a small band of six scout pilots, one monkey-mascot, and a team of Baby Nieuports, hangared in a large meadow that was the nearest aerodrome to the then front in Palestine
