My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleyarose acutely whether the BE2C would come out of its protracted dive before we hit it.We emerged just in time, skimming low over the aerodrome hangars. After amoment's pause for reflection I noticed that the aircraft was climbing once more andagain I turned round. Hawker indicated that he was going up again to have another go.I equally firmly intimated not with me. He then put me down in the gathering duskand a developing snowstorm. Nothing daunted, he went off alone, and did it to hisown satisfaction. Such is the stuff that V.C.s are made of. Hawker's early death was atragedy and a continuing loss to his country, for his gifts and qualities would througha long life have given it high and enduring service.The tragedy was always masked by gaiety. The extreme, almost exaggerated gaiety ofthose who flew on each side has been noted recently in films which have skilfullyreproduced much technical detail but have been less successful in theircharacterisation. It was perhaps necessary to live with those men to understand whythis gaiety was a necessity, sustaining an attitude to life which has never yet beencorrectly portrayed. In short and crude expression, a dinner-party of intimate friendshas to be merry if night after night there is a strong possibility that some of thosepresent will not be there the following evening. In the trenches casualties could, ofcourse, be terribly heavy, but, in a strange sense, death was more natural in thosebleak and sinister surroundings. We were like men having dinner together in a countryhouse-party, knowing that some must soon leave us for ever; in the end, nearly all.This experience must also have been familiar to pilots and air crews in the SecondWorld War.An attitude later became clear to me which was at first incomprehensible andsomething of a shock. Soon after I arrived with the squadron, we were in a truck juststarting a short journey into the town to lunch after the morning reconnaissance, whenone of our machines came in to land obviously rather out of control after being badlyshot up. It hit the ground, bounced and turned over on its back with a crash whichsmashed it badly; by a lucky chance it did not then catch fire in the usual fashion. Ijumped out and started to run toward the machine to help pull out its occupants.Shouts came from the truck—'Where are you off to?—Come on, jump up—we arelate for lunch—The men on duty will see to that lot'. Off we drove. The pilot andobserver in the crashed machine were very popular, yet not a word was said aboutthem. Suddenly they appeared in the doorway, very much the worse for wear, but—surprisingly—alive. Roars of laughter resounded through the little room—'Well, well,we thought we had got rid of you that time—never mind, have a drink'. Packets ofback-chat ensued. That was the way of it, and it was the only way.The R.F.C. celebrated the same spirit in its own macabre songs in the lugubrious,humorous tradition of the British army. These men were nearly all officers of thesmall regular army who had voluntereed to fly in the early days, an elite of a corpsd'elite. On a convivial occasion they would break into a long, sad but merry chantwhose title was 'The Dying Aviator'. He was expressing his last wishes after a fatalcrash, in which he had suffered multifarious mutilations described in bloody detail. Alittle depressing were some of the melancholy lines enjoining with much technicalterminology the careful removal of various engine parts from the more delicateregions of the human frame. In fact, the legendary warrior was particularly fortunate,for he was not burned alive. We had in that period no parachutes, and men had to staywith the machine until it crashed. The flimsy contraption of wood and canvas would51 of 424