Victor Chapman's Letters from France (WWI Centenary Series) by Victor Chapman

Author:Victor Chapman [Chapman, Victor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, World War I
ISBN: 9781528765749
Google: TP83EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Read Books Ltd
Published: 2021-06-28T22:11:33+00:00

AVIATION

Aviation.

AVIATION

August 8, 1915.

Dear Alce: You ought to know when this reaches you that I have finally changed corps. A typical instance of the way things are done in the army is the way I was told the news. I was sitting in the sunshine playing mumble-the-peg with three or four others before mounting squad. Ames came up and whispered in my ear that a sergeant had just told him I was going to the Aviation. An hour or so later the sergeant, in an off-hand way, said I was to leave. That evening I met the Lieutenant who begged me not to forget to drop him a card. When or whither I was leaving no one seemed to know. The next day I almost collared the Lieutenant and we went together to the Bureau. Oh yes, the demand had come for me to be sent without delay to the Gare Regulatrice de Gray: I was leaving at seven the next morning. With many adieux and five fellows helping me on with my sack, I got off and presented myself in due course at the station of Champagny with a sealed letter of the Commissionaire Militaire.

The contents of the letter proved that it was quite unnecessary to go to Gray since my destination was Nancy. “Change at Lure.” A jolly unmodern town with a Grande Rue, Louis Quinze windows, keystones, a pond and trees, and a provincial brown-stone Louis XIV château,—now the Sous-préfecture. At Ailleures, I waited again three hours. It was some time before I could find the town here. Finally I saw it across the track on a hill a mile off, with stone church, the image of a New England eighteenth century wood structure. Less amusing town than Lure, but with very pretty children (to whom I gave the cakes which a drummer had forced upon me in a café of Lure), and chickens perched on the window-sills. Groups of old women and young girls were industriously stuffing green litre bottles with new string beans; and I found an old farmer before the tobacco shop with a handsome yoke of oxen actually tied together with nothing more or less than his umbrella! Oh, I forgot to tell you of the typical canny, old hay-seed that talked endlessly to a well-groomed country lawyer or doctor, in the train from Lure, about how much you could make on sheep in certain pastures: what were the best varieties of clover for early harvest: what kinds of grasses to plant with wheat: and why the old-fashioned brown barley was better than the other varieties in spite of its obvious defects, etc., and I could not get to sleep. He took me to a café with a territorial friend whom he found guarding at the station. We drank beer and they took snuff and both gave me sound advice on aviation—they were versed in mechanics,—the one knew a mowing-machine and the other ran a flour mill. Incidentally they were not a little dissatisfied

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