Flying Chariots of War

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22540, 3 October 1936, Page 4 (Supplement)

Flying Chariots of War

THEUE are several reasons, besides the stimulation of the author's very good company, why everyone should read " Sagittarius Rising," by Cecil Lewis. Perhaps the most important one is that it comes as a direct challenge to the murmurs of war which are heard on all sides to-day. Cecil Lewis was a Hying ace in the Great War. Ho enlisted at 16 from the Omidle School, where, as a pupil of the groat Sanderson, he had a pacifist training. He was of the very finest type of youth, both physically and mentally. His father was a minister of repute, while the boy had an instinctive love of nature and beauty, and was something ot a poet. He had a natural inclination i'or the air, and had the extreme good fortune to come through with his life. Two years following the war were spent in China teaching the Chinese to

flv. Since then his lifts, has followed an entirely different pattern. The 20 years that have passed since his war experiences have given him detachment. His passion to communicate his memories appears to have strengthened, and in consequence he has the reader very much at his mercy. His heart swells, and the reader's too, at the memory of that first visible, collective farewell of a squadron leaving for France. "I.can see them," he says, "as they came hurtling up, their goggled pilots and observers leaning down to wave a last farewell before they passed in a deafening flash of speed and smoke 50ft. overhead. ... I was an onlooker that day; they were a symbol of the time; young men who roso up, passed with a cry and a gesture, and were gone. When my turn came I did not feel it so." In France ? in due course, he served on observation patrol, and later on contact patrol. Mr. Lewis performed his duty with intelligence and more than ordinarv courage. The air was his chosen element; he was probably one of the best pilots in the squadron,

Air Fighting, Past arid Future

and looking down from the air ho actually pitied the soldiers crawling in the trenches, although lie admits that under other circumstances he envied them the companionship in action of their fellows. In the observation patrol the job was to correct a battery's shooting. In the contact patrol it was an aerial liaison between the front line and the battalion and the brigade headquarters, designed to keep them in close touch with each other during the inevitable disorganisation of other means of communication in an odensivd. _ .As a contact patrol he did his air fighting and accounted for numerous German aeroplanes, but this duel in the air between matched opponents had something exhilarating about it - a battle of champions fought in flying chariots." There was no demand made on him for atrocities. It was not his work to drop bombs, although he relates that once, seeing a solitary undemolislicd house in a devastated area, lie responded gailv to the natural instinct for destruction, and flying to the aerodrome to collect a bomb, dropped it

with breathless precision above the house —and missed. He recalls with horror his first sight of poison gas —a long, creeping wraith of yellow mist —and reminds his readers that the next war will see that yellow drift, not stealing down into front-line dug-outs, but along London streets. "My breed, the pilots whose war has been more chivalrous and clean-handed than any other, will be ordered to do violence to the civilian population. We shall drop bombs and poison tho reservoirs. "Sagittarius Rising" bears the authentic stamp of the mental outlook of youth engaged in air-fighting through the last war. It makes excellent and exciting reading, but it also issues a warning. Mr. Lewis writes fine prose, and since he must be one of the very few pilots who came through unscathed it is doubly good that he brings his maturer powers to bear upon his memories. His book makes an important addition to the already considerable history of the Great War. "Saßittarins Rising," by Cecil Lewis. (Peter Davies.)