Books: Pterodactyl’s Pilot

SAGITTARIUS RISING—Cecil Lewis— Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

When Cecil Lewis joined the British Royal Flying Corps in the spring of 1915 he was 17 years old. The mechanically-minded son of a minister, he was already so tall (6 ft. 3 in.) that the primitive flying machines of that period could scarcely hold him. When he made his first flight in a Maurice Farman “Longhorn,” with his doubled-up knees interfering with the “handlebars” that worked the ailerons, he could understand why the War Office had almost turned him down at first glance. For the airplanes at that stage of the War —the Avros, Moranes, Bristol Bullets, DH 4’s—were designed with little thought for the comfort or convenience of the men who flew them. Like the prehistoricpterodactyl, which they somewhat resembled in appearance, most of these types are extinct now, were being supplanted before the War was over. Gaunt, unstable contraptions, held together with piano wire (the pilots used to say that canaries could be caged in their rigging) most of them rose slowly and landed fast, crashed easily and were hard to control in the air. When Cecil Lewis began his training, the average life of a British pilot on the Western Front was three weeks.

His own course was more fortunate. Born with the sign of Sagittarius the archer, which governs “voyages and weapons and all swift things,” in hishoroscope, rising, he served throughout the War, won the Military Cross, had spent eight months overseas, including four months of the battle of the Somme, and 350 hours in the air, when he was transferred to the relatively safe job of trying out new machines. The story of his charmed life among the pterodactyls is an interesting, if uneven, book that sets a new mark in the reminiscences of War-time pilots.

No self-conscious hero, Lewis writes little of the spectacular deeds of heroism that usually fill such memoirs. He loved flying for its own sake—to get up above the clouds and stare at the “level plain of radiant whiteness, sparkling in the sun” when the unearthly light seemed to permeate every atom of air in the “dazzling, perfect basin of blue.” Then he was as happy, he felt, as he could ever be. A rainbow at that height was not an arc but a perfect circle. He could dive and turn to watch the shadow of his plane on the clouds. Down below him the yellow wraith of gas crept “pantherlike over the scarred earth, curling down into dugouts, coiling and uncoiling at the wind’s whim.” In the networks of wires and trenches, the miles of invisible men, walking, talking, fighting, dying, the great chaos of war always seemed insanely futile from the air. From the new perspective of height the men who fought “in verminous filth to take the next trench 30 yards away” seemed incredible, since the pilot could see, beyond that objective, one after another, 70 miles away. Lewis’ strongest memories were not of isolated battles, although he recalled several of them, but of poetic and philosophic experiences high above the earth: his first sight of the War from the height of two miles, flights over London at night, successive realizations of the triviality of man’s work. God, he reflected, could come within a mile of earth and never see a sign of humanity. Cities seemed only “curious and intricate agglomerations of little pink boxes,” insignificant, ugly, impermanent compared with the patterns of woods and fields.

Cecil Lewis’ more conventional War experiences included a love affair with the mistress of a French officer, a number of accidents and one wound, a bad defeat in mimic warfare with the great French Pilot Guynemer, flights through the spectacular bombardment that opened the Somme offensive, a ludicrous mishap when his plane got away and raced around a field until it crashed. At 19 he was exhausted, weakened with eyestrain, his nerves ajangle, motivated only by a fatalistic conviction that, he would get through. The only time Lewis felt any anger against an enemy air man was during a bombing of London, when he was on night patrol above the city and could see the bombs strike with out being able to locate the Gothas that were dropping them. That made him realize that future wars would mean air at tacks on cities, since “some bombers will always get through.” It made him a pacifist as well, convinced that new wars are inevitable, with no solution for them except through some vaguely-conceived World State.

With the Armistice Lewis got a post in augurating a Chinese airline and teaching Chinese students to fly. He lived in Peking for two years, owned his own Chinese house at the age of 22, suddenly quit flying.