Dinsmore Ely

I could not make the facilities for printing pictures here suffice, so I have sent the films to Paris. It will be a couple of weeks before I can send them to you. I have taken very few pictures here, but intend to take some soon. The country hereabout is very beautiful and fertile; the sunsets have been simply glorious. The country is moist and rich in color. I am not much pleased with the group of men in this barracks and will change as soon as there is a vacancy in the one I like, but I sleep and read and walk. I am reading Catherine de’ Medici, by Balzac. It is rich in the history of Paris. Tell father to write me whenever he can. I wish you and father would get a little vest-pocket camera like mine and send me pictures whenever you can. I find that I have a passion for photographs. Those that I have I look at almost every day.

It’s good to hear that you are enjoying yourself at Black Oak. I hardly think you will be able to be miserable because Bob and I are not with you. Send any newspaper clippings of interest.

A man just came into the room with a rumor that sixty more men are to leave here in a couple of days, but does not say where they are going. At next writing I may be almost anywhere. Guess I’ll scout around and get some pictures right away. Well, much love to you, Mother dear, and to father, and to everyone else.

    Your loving son,
    Dinsmore.

    Bourges (Cher), August 19, 1917.

Dear Mother:

Day before yesterday I got permission to come down to Bourges where the great cathedral of St. Etienne is. It is the third best cathedral in France, and is simply magnificent. I stayed till yesterday afternoon, and then returned to camp. Bourges is fifteen miles from Avord. Then I found we had repos and did not go to class till tomorrow evening, so I came right back to Bourges on the first train. I will have been in the town two days and a half – well, nothing could be better. The town is built upon gentle slopes which fall away from the cathedral in its center. Houses are here ranging from just before the war back to 1200 A.D., perhaps further. Hundreds of architectural treasures are hidden in its narrow streets. A town of 45,000, it contains more good architectural designs than Chicago. But the cathedral – oh, how wonderful! I went straight to it, led by its towers showing above the house tops, and when it came into full view I stopped still and held my breath. Ponderous, massive, standing elegant, magnificent, mounting upward, delicate, airy in the skies. It held me and pressed so upon my feelings. What was it? The wonderful spirit of endeavor and faith and love of a hundred generations trying to please their God. The genius of seven centuries bending its power to produce a single masterpiece and then the endeavor of one small human being to grasp all this and hold it in one glance – as the sound of a hundred thousand voices cheering their parting army. It made me want to cry. I walked all around it twice. I took pictures of it from every angle in case something should happen to it or me. Then I went in. Oh, why try? It cannot be described. No wonder they kneel. My thoughts whispered to each other in awe. Faint glows in rainbow hues from the gorgeously stained windows played in the distance among the forest of columns. Across the altar, which seemed like a dwarf shrine in a giant citadel six candles twinkled, as if to demonstrate the smallness of the life of man. There before the altar knelt a priest, small, with bowed head. Then there was a stir in the air, slight at first, but growing with rising and falling crescendo, and the monotonous drone of the chant echoed and reechoed among the columns till it filled the whole vault, and then died away into religious silence. I turned and mounted the winding stair into the bell tower, counting the steps – four hundred and six – four hundred and seven – oh, here was something that I could grasp and describe. There were four hundred and seven six-inch steps. The tower was two hundred and four feet high.

The fine old warden of the keys told me he couldn’t take me over the place without a permit from the architect of the city, so I went to the architect’s home, only to find him out. When I returned to the cathedral, disappointed, the old man said that if I would return at nine in the morning he would take me through. At nine in the morning we started. We started up the tower and branched off at one of the little doors into the clerestory that led all around the inside of the church nave. Here we saw the organ. From here we mounted a dark, uneven passage within the walls which brought us out to the lowest stage of the roof, where the bases of the flying buttresses rest. We traversed the gutter, which was really a promenade, to the choir end of the cathedral. Here again we wound up a circular stairs within a great buttress pier and came out on the little narrow stair cut right up the flying buttress span to the main roof. Here we entered another little door, and found ourselves right in the garret over the altar. Under my feet was the great span of the main vault, and over my head the original joinery of the great peaked roof. In the darkness of the garret we passed great old windlasses for lowering the huge candelabra which hung in the nave. We traversed the garret to where through a little door a shaky scaffolding led over a deep pit to the tower of the prison. Here, again, was a huge chamber lighted by narrow slits in twenty-foot walls. We descended again and at every landing was a narrow cell which came to a point in a small slit which admitted light and indentation in the stone on which to sit. It was uncanny. It was a relief to come again to the day, where the bright sunlight played upon gargoyles and grotesques hiding in the carved stone.

Such a feast of the imagination! I could sit down now and write a novel laid in the confines of that pile. Then a fellow whom I met and I went down and explored the crypt. There were unlit shrines and unaired vaults which ended by a wall one could not see over, and the air was cool and damp and so bad a match would not burn. We went out to breathe fresh air, and dream in the sun.

    Your Son.

    Ecole d’Aviation, Tours, August 28, 1917.

Dear Mother:

I am so sore I’ve got to give expression to my feelings. You see, the truth of the matter is that I’ve been in the hospital five days with bronchitis, and though I am practically better now I have just heard that the doctor said I must stay eight more days. It will put me so much behind my class that I am furious. It all started with a stomach ache and high fever the day I arrived in Tours. They put me in the infirmary two days and then sent me to the hospital. I was pretty sick the first two days, but it’s all gone practically. My temperature is thirty-seven degrees centigrade. But it is all bull. I shall be 2,000 meters in the air when you receive this. So it will be the height of folly to think of worrying.

Tours is a pretty town on the river Loire, and I am waiting to go for a swim the first time my nurse takes me for a walk. They have not brought in my suitcase yet, so I must still use this paper. I have a number of sketches to finish up when the suitcase comes. Also it contains my books. This is a good place to study French. One of the men here was in Salonica two years and now has been in the hospital eleven months with colonial fever. Another cannot talk above a whisper. They are all generous and all think every American is deathly rich. One of the fellows set up a box of petits gâteaux (French pastry), and I passed it around. As these cakes are a rare delicacy and considered quite dear, each man had to be pressed to take one. There is an English-speaking nurse here with a face like a blighted turnip. There is a gentle old Catholic Sister with great white wings on her hat, who is wonderful. She speaks only French, but she smiles in every language. I am getting a profound respect for the Catholic church.

Well, my suitcase came today and I am all cleaned up. I’ve finished two letters that were started, so guess I’ll close this one with love.

    Your Son.

Dear Family:

It has been quite a while since I have written you, and this letter must be a short one, but lots of things have been happening. As a matter of fact, there is a good long letter half written in my note book, but it is not here yet.

Well, in the first place, I spent three days in Bourges. It is an aged town, was once the stopping place of Caesar, has been twice capital of France, and is rich in architectural treasures of all ages. The best thing there is the cathedral of St. Etienne, which I think you will find pictured and described in the encyclopedia. I spent my whole time sketching and sight-seeing, and will be perfectly contented to live within two hundred yards of it for a month. Traveling alone is the best way to see things. There are more doors that a single person can pass through. I traversed much worn, winding stairways, and chilling passages, darksome. I saw cells and pits of torture of the Inquisition. The youngest part of the cathedral is four times as old as the United States. For the architect, it is a jewel; for the historian a treasure; for the poet, a dream; for the conqueror, a tomb; for the soul-torn, a haven; and a place of worship for everyone. A French nurse whom I met this morning said, “Why do they destroy the churches? The churches belong to everyone. They are theirs as well as ours.”

It was fortunate I took the opportunity of seeing Bourges, for the day after I returned to Avord we were all sent here to Tours to another school of aviation, devoted entirely to Americans. There is another wonderful cathedral here. We are learning a little more about our prospects. There are both U. S. Army and Navy men at this camp. The conditions of this camp are infinitely better than at Avord. Sheets on the bed, much better food, tablecloths, china, a piano, and better system.

    Dinsmore.

    September 4, 1917.

Dear Mother:

It is rather tiresome sitting in the hospital when I am not sick in the least, but to suggest leaving is to insult the man with authority to release me. When he finally decides to let me go, it will take three days for the red tape to be carried through, which permits me to return to the Ecole d’Aviation. Meanwhile, I am losing several hours of flying. The good September season is just opening, and the days are delightful. We are given permission to leave the hospital and spend a day wandering around the historical city of Tours. I have been making pencil sketches and water colors, and it would really be very enjoyable if I were not so restless to get to work. You see, the time is a rather critical one. Anything is liable to happen; the United States Government may take us over. They want monitors in the States to teach flying, and if we are taken over we will probably be sent back without any fighting experience to act as monitors in the training school over there.

This is all very indefinite, but I do not like to get behind the bunch or be away from the camp at a time when these changes may be made; still there is no use fretting and I suppose things will work out all right. Anyway, I am not sick, and they must let me out pretty soon. I am on good terms with the chief doctor, who is a painter, and took an interest in my sketches and paintings. He offered to take me out to his house and show me his collection. I do not know when he will do so. I am trying to develop my general culture while there is opportunity, and have read six of Balzac’s novels, historical and otherwise. There is a wonderful chance to study architecture, and I am keeping up my sketching in water color, as well as studying a little French. Unfortunately, I left my history book in Paris, but will get what I can from Baedeker, and all the time I am storing up energy to use when the time comes. As to this prospect of the members of the Foreign Legion returning to America as monitors, most of the men do not like the idea of returning without some fighting experience. I am of that turn of mind. Men going back would be so much more able monitors if they had served on the Front, and they would be much more contented to return. There would be no doubt in my mind that I would remain in the French Foreign Legion if it were not for the fact that at present they are making monitors first lieutenants, with high pay, and a respectable office. Reason dictates that this will be changed very soon. I believe the men who are already officers will not be put back, however. If this should be the case, the time to enter United States service is now. Money is not everything, but three thousand a year is not to be ignored. This is all conjecture, and I have not made up my mind as to what to do, and shall not until fuller and more reliable information is given out.

The life here in the hospital is very pleasant. We wake at seven and have a little French breakfast of bread and coffee in bed; then we lie awake and read or doze for an hour or so. Rising at eight-thirty, we clean up and make our bed and read or write letters till lunch, which is a heavy meal served at eleven. By permission from the doctor, we are then at liberty to go out and spend our time as we please until five, when we eat again. Of late I have been going over and watching the full moon rise on the river Loire after supper; I retire at eight or nine.

The French have a strange custom of closing all their windows at night, but Americans are permitted to have one window open in their end of the room. French medical authorities are convinced that two open windows in the same room are very unhealthy and dangerous.

We have a good time wandering about the quaint, narrow streets, where strange people peer out of small, low windows, and undersized doors. The houses are so old that different materials and workmanship of a dozen repairs give their façades a mottled appearance of many centuries, which suggest a strange collection of antiques within. This is carried out by glimpses through windows whose shutters are hanging aslant or thrown open. Within are seen old four-poster beds with canopies and feather mattresses which are round and swelled up as if inflated. Wrinkled old women with queer caps squint as they peer out, while their hands rest in embroidery. Elsewhere, little low passageways open into crammed little courts, with uneven tile floors, scrub trees, and a half-open circular stone staircase. Natural flowers and grass grow from the moss-covered tile roofs.

Washing hangs from front windows, and people come out to empty their wash water and their refuse in the street gutter. Cats abound. I hope the sights and experiences of war will not wipe out all these quaint and pleasant sights which make Europe what it is.

    Your Son.

Dear Family:

Things are speeding up. I’m out of the hospital. Came to the school Friday. Found I had about the best bed in our barracks and was in the smallest class with one of the best monitors – more luck. I am an hour and a half of flying behind the other fellows, but that is not bad.

Well, the hospital did not cure my bronchitis. That, however, is nothing but a chronic cough which will mend here better than there. What it did cure, however, was my distaste for my fellow-countrymen; the cure was absolute, and of greater value than my physical cure could have been. My, but it was good to get back with the bunch again. All my old interest in people has revived, and I am more than content.

And I have flown! Wonderful. Oh, it was great. Saturday evening I went up for fifteen minutes as a passenger. Then Sunday morning we went up on my first ten minute lesson. When we were a hundred meters off the ground and had gone a quarter of a mile, the pilot gave the controls over to me and rested his hands over the side while I drove entirely alone. It is more simple than driving an automobile because there is no road to watch. A glance at this side, a glance at that, to see that the wings are level. The throttle is set full at the outset and forgotten till you descend. There is a speedometer to watch and that is all.

Of course this is just driving in a straight line through good air. Ascent is dangerous; landing, an art in itself. Every curve has its corresponding angle of bank, and the angle varies according to the direction of the wind relative to line of flight. Perfect carburetion is essential at all altitudes, but that all comes later. An understanding of air currents and their effects must become instinctive; so, after all, the statement that it is easy applies only where someone else is there to do the worrying and look after the important details, any one of which stands between the here and the hereafter. The pilot said I did well on my first two sorties.

Monday I went in to paint with the doctor, but he was going to an Allied musical fête given by the hospital for the reeducation of wounded soldiers, and so I accompanied him. Like all charity affairs, some of it was very boresome, but there was some very good music and one singer from the Opéra Comique of Paris. I shall go another day to paint with the doctor.

This letter has been written out on the field, and as it has been continued through three classes I had better mail it. Have not heard from home for ten days or more. Had a couple of letters from my marraine.

    Son.

    September 11, 1917.

Dear Family:

From the sky the world is just as beautiful as from the ground, but all in a different way. Fields and farms become checks and plaids in varied greens and browns. Stream necklaces and jeweled lakes bedeck the landscape around. Horizon lines jump back ten leagues, and clouds swim by in droves. The setting sun may rise again for him who mounts to fly. Man, groping about in great fields assumes his actual size and importance in the universe; instead of being the egotistical, dominating element in an unimportant foreground he shrinks to an atom, and the eternal infinite engulfs him. I can imagine a future life as a soul speeding through space, existing upon a sensation, a boundless view, and a breath of air.

The flying is progressing well. The monitor said tonight that he seldom had seen a pupil so apt, that I was doing well and would take up landings tomorrow. Twice today he let me take the aeroplane off the ground. I’ve had an hour and fifteen minutes of flying now and will soon catch up with the class, as far as ability is concerned. Our monitor is a wonderful teacher and a splendid flyer.

I’m just as busy as I care to be. Up at five o’clock; work, six to ten; lecture, ten to eleven; repose to three; lecture, three to four; work four to nine. I haven’t had time to mail this letter, but I’ll do it tomorrow.

Well, I’m simply wild about this life. The country is beautiful; châteaux abound; pretty farms – but I must go to bed.

    Good night,
    Dinsmore.

One thing I forgot to mention – the machines we are running now take all the strength a man has to operate one of them in rough weather. After a ten minute ride, my right arm and shoulder aches. The story of an aviator landing and fainting from physical exhaustion does not seem as far-fetched as it did.

Dear Family:

My first solo ride was this morning. It consisted of going in a straight line for half a mile at a height of two hundred feet. Everything went finely – no fear, excitement, nor difficulty. Oh, how I am going to love it! I am inclined to believe that the nervous strain of driving will be less than that of driving an automobile after I have mastered the technique. Imagine being lost in the clouds, having to fight for one’s life in a storm! Great stuff! One man had his engine stop at low altitude, went into a wing slip, and smashed his machine to atoms. He bruised his knee, but goes up tomorrow. Some of the final tests consist of petits voyages about the country – a couple of hundred miles. This is the château country, and several of the men have been having experiences. One man’s motor went bad and made him descend near a little town. He was arrested as a German spy, but on proving his identity was released by the mayor of the town. When he returned to his machine he found a Renault limousine waiting for him. The liveried chauffeur asked if he would favor the madame by taking dinner with them. He granted the favor, and rode back through the streets down which he had been led thirty minutes before by a gendarme. He came to a great château, was introduced to some twenty girls (guests) among which were six girls of his age, both French and English. He was given a room and bath and fitted out with clothes which belonged to the son of the house, in aviation service at the Front. It was three days before he could get his machine fixed. During that time he was the chief guest, escorting the hostess into the dining room, canoeing, pheasant hunting, motoring, and playing tennis with charming girls. He had a small car at his disposal, and a valet to attend him. They called him “Sammy” and urged him to return. It was the home of the Councillor of Gasoline of France. What luck! Half the men that go out have some such story when they return, but this man received the “aluminum lawnmower.” It is everybody’s hope to have some such trouble.

We are so busy now that I cannot write as much as I should like to. I am trying to keep up some other correspondence.