Dinsmore Ely

Now, I do not see how anyone could hope to be an architect without seeing the works of this old country. I never knew what design or interior decoration or landscape gardening were before. Every day reveals a new jewel whose impression may leave an idea for future work. Certainly the unconscious assimilation of ideas and proportions will be invaluable. I am not endeavoring to drive myself into following any of these new interests, as I feel it essential to conserve all physical and nervous energy for what will probably be the greatest tax on my life at the Front. My natural tastes seem good enough for the present to lead me to an enjoyment of the best, and I am experiencing the novelty for the first time in my life of living entirely according to my natural taste – not that I have ever been cramped, but family environment and educational influence have always dictated my course in life. Now I am swimming entirely alone, and it is pleasant for a new man. This living abroad puts one in tune with the ways of the world.

My love to you all.

    Your son,
    Dinsmore Ely.

Dear Father:

My first experience, a bit exciting, came rather early. On my second solo flight when I was half way around and going with the wind at a height of one hundred meters the motor stopped. That is about as bad as can happen at such a height for a student. The minute your motor stops you have to peak at thirty degrees and land into the wind. When my motor stopped, I looked for a landing, and peaked. The landing was a little behind me, so I made a short turn with a steep bank and managed to straighten her out just in time for a bare landing. It is very difficult to turn and bank with a dead motor, and I feel rather elated; and the best of it was that I was not frightened or worried in the least. It all went just as easily and naturally as I believed it would when I took up aviation. The great problem is not to lose speed, you know. In the Nieuport hangars they hang a motto: “Loss of speed is death.” Well, the field I had landed in was a bit rough and weedy, but there was a smooth, long stretch adjacent, so I decided to try to get her out myself. You see, the engines we use are Gnome rotary, an archaic type, and very impractical. At the field men hold the machine while the mechanic adjusts the carbureter, and then at a given signal it is released and soars skyward. The charm is that when shut off it won’t start again till you prime it, and the mechanic adjusts the carbureter over again for full speed. Well, a Ford was just passing, and they stopped and waited to see what I’d do. I went over and got a can from them to prime the engine with gas, then I cranked the thing and when it started up it darn near ran away with the poor scared man before I could get to the seat, so then I taxied the “girl” up to the far end of the field and wheeled her around. It takes two hundred yards to get to twenty feet height. I had three hundred yards to adjust the carbureter in and clear a row of trees thirty feet high, into the wind, of course. Well, they had explained the thing to us, and I had watched the mechanics, so I gave it to her and didn’t look up till I got the engine going. By that time the trees were one hundred yards ahead. She rose a little and I kept her low till she gained speed, and twenty-five yards from the trees I pulled her up and she fairly bounded over the road. I made an “S” curve and just got over the field at the school when the engine died again, and I came down by the bunch with a cylinder burned out.

    November 15, 1917.

Dear Father:

Where the sky turns from an azure blue to a rosy pink the delicate new moon rests with its points toward the evening star. From these two jewels of heaven, the sunset sky grades away to a misty, mysterious horizon. The gray distance is offset with a delicate lacework of the autumn-stripped hedge of poplars with their slim, graceful lattice work, reaching to points in the pink, and where the dark earth and the white road come to the foreground, two great apple trees with their gnarled autumn boughs frame the scene of simple beauty as it fades to night. As I entered the kitchen of a little old farm house, which people who eat there choose to call the “Aviator,” cheery voices and appetizing odors greeted me in preparation for the evening meal. The clean tile floor, the whitewashed walls, the low-hung, richly stained rafters, and the old walnut chest by the brick fireplace all made me think of Aunt Maggie’s old kitchen where the pies and the cookies were kept, and that makes me think of other fireplaces and other rafters – and the folks at home.

So I just sit down to the oilcloth-covered table and try to tell them what a restless, twentieth-century lad thinks of the environment of his parents’ childhood.

    Dinsmore.

Dear Family:

Today started out very foggy, because there was no wind. We stood in the field till one o’clock waiting for the air to clear. I got a machine by four. The next hour contained enough excitement to do for the day. The planes are like mad little Indian ponies turned loose in the field – or, better still, like Pegasus bound into the air with a spirit that must be tamed by steady nerves and gentle hand. It is hard to describe just the feeling which possesses one. We are taught the principles and the movements that control the machine and then we are sent alone into the air to find an understanding of them. Perhaps you are turning a corner at an angle of forty-five degrees on the bank. Suddenly you feel something is wrong. The wind whistles louder than usual. Is it because you are pointing nose down, or are you sliding out over the rim of the curve, or down into the center of it? It is one of the three, and to correct the wrong one is to make worse the other two, yet the correction must be made. Now it is too late to figure it out, so you just correct it without thinking, and wonder which fault it was. In an animal we call it instinct, but there is an instant there which, when it passes, leaves a vacuum in the nervous system. The machine climbs like a tiger, and as we are not yet permitted to cut down the gas, it takes much strength to hold its nose down. I made fifteen five-minute rides, and now I’m pleasantly tired and relaxed.

I had ten rides in the eighteen-meter Nieuport and am getting the run of it. It is one of the most difficult machines to drive. I had bad luck in motors or would have finished today. My motor stopped twice when I was twenty-five meters from the ground, but I landed without mishap. With these machines the wing area is so small you head almost straight for the ground and just straighten out in time to land. You make a tour of five or six miles and mount a thousand feet into the air in five minutes – but you will be tired of reading this sort of thing very soon. The thing to do is to go to some aviation field and see it all done.

One of father’s letters arrived with a lot of clippings in it. Those clippings are very interesting. I enjoy them much more than the papers. The Saturday Evening Post is read from cover to cover and passed about till the pages are thin, so it would fill a big demand. Another book on aviation came. I have not yet had time to finish the first one. As they go into the technical end of things rather deeply, I can only study a small amount at a time. Most of my reading lately has been history.

    Dins.

    Bourges, November 7, 1917.

Dear Family:

I am at Bourges on my way to Avord after my happy permission in Paris. As there were no train connections I had to stay here over night. Well, last Sunday we went to an American church, with an all-American service. It seemed rather pleasant. In the afternoon we went to the Opéra Comique to see Werther and Cavalleria Rusticana. They were both splendid and included some of the best stars. Oh, how I love the opera!

… I spent Monday afternoon in roaming about Paris. I went to the Louvre and Gardens of the Tuileries and Luxembourg, and to several of the less important churches. I saw St. James’s church from the tower of which the bells were rung as a signal on the night of St. Bartholomew. I believe I know Paris and its sights better now than Chicago, not that I have seen everything – one could never do that – but just the general layout. I never will get tired raving about the architecture.

My train leaves soon.

    With love,
    Your Son.

    November 10, 1917.

Dear Father:

Yours of October 13 received. The letters of my family are of more interest and intimacy than ever before. You say I should be glad you are not in the machine with me to give me advice, but I say unto you, “You are the one to be glad.” If you are worried by the thought of what might happen if a steering buckle in an automobile should break, how would you feel to be hanging on wires and compressed air? Once in the air it is a fool’s pastime to think of what might happen. The god of luck is the aviator’s saint. Man pits his resource against the invisible, and never for an instant doubts his ability. Those who doubt are probably those who do not come back. They are much in need of Nieuport pilots, and rushing us through as fast as weather permits.

Cannot write tonight as everybody is telling flying stories.

    Good night,
    Your Son.

    November 12, 1917.

Dear Bob:

Your letter came yesterday, and as I am in a great writing mood tonight I shall answer it. First, to tell you what we are doing. We are now back at the school of Avord. Here we learn to fly the Nieuport. A year ago that was the fastest plane at the Front and they still use them as fighting planes. First we ride in double command “twenty-eight’s.” (Twenty-eight means twenty-eight meters square of wing surface.) Then we do “twenty-three” double command and then are cut loose on them. Lastly, we finish with twenty rides solo in an “eighteen.” I finish the “twenty-eight” class tomorrow and will be through at this school in ten days. The eighteen-meter machines land at ninety miles an hour. They are wonderful little things and will do anything in the air. We go to work at six in the morning, and return at six in the evening, but the hardest work is waiting when there is too much wind to fly. We build a fire and sit about telling stories and making toast. When we cannot get bread we just tell stories. When it rains we go in the tent and read. I am reading a history of France. It is more fun to read history than to study it, and I think you know more when you get through. Of course I am surrounded by all the old castles and battle grounds and graves of the warriors of seven centuries. That makes a difference.

There was a bad accident the week before I got here. A two-passenger plane struck a solo plane in the air. It was a head-on collision, and all three aviators were killed. That is a very rare accident, though.

I see America is preparing for five years of war. You may get over yet. Write me whenever you can. You do not know how much your letters help to buck up a lonely brother sometimes.

    Your ever loving brother,
    Dins.

    November 13, 1917.

Dear Mother:

Today was a wonderful, clear, crisp November day, and we breathed our fill of it. I had seven rides in a twenty-eight meter and one in a twenty-three meter Nieuport. In life the things we look forward to usually fall below our expectations, but not so in aviation. In aviation, every experience so totally eclipses all expectations that you realize you were totally incapable of imagination in that field. We change planes five times in progressing from Penguin to Spad. Each change is as great an advance and difference as stepping from a box car to a locomobile limousine with Westinghouse shock absorbers.

The Nieuport is the plane we are using now, with a man to give the scale. It has a supporting area of twenty-three square meters. It is the fighting plane used at the Front seven or eight months ago.

    Dinsmore.

    November 15, 1917.

Dear Mother:

Things are going quite well. Day before yesterday I left the twenty-eight meter Nieuport class and today finished the twenty-three meter class and was advanced. Tomorrow I shall finish solo work on the twenty-three’s and take up eighteen’s. The monitors seem to think my work fairly good. The little eighteen-meter Nieuports are great. They are small and racy, with a wing spread of twenty-five feet. They have fine speed and land at eighty-five miles an hour. You land by cutting off the power and pointing the nose for the ground. By pulling the tail down she slows up and finally drops a yard to the ground. It is a very precise sport.

You would like it fine above the clouds, Mother. It is most beautiful and dazzling as the sun’s rays bounce along on the snowy billows, and you can swoop down and skim the crest of the cloud waves till the frost turns the wires to silver and your cheeks sting red in the mist.

    Dinsmore.

    Ecole d’Aviation, Pau, November 22, 1917.

Dear Father:

This is the most pleasantly situated and best regulated camp I have been in yet. Pau itself is on a little plateau overlooking a valley with a river and surrounded by the foothills of the Pyrenees. On the sky line to the south and west of the beautiful snow-capped peaks, 4,000 feet high.

In this environment we are to attain proficiency in the handling of the war plane. The trip down from Avord was a tedious one, with a pleasant break of day at Toulouse. I came down with two Frenchmen who were excellent company. We spent two nights on the train. All the sleeping cars are used at the Front to carry wounded, so we slept sitting up. Sleeping cars are not so common in Europe, I guess. When I woke up yesterday morning the character of the country had changed from the rolling valleys of Touraine to the more rocky and broken country of Toulouse. The buildings were brick instead of stone, and one could see the round arch and barrel vault of Romanesque influence, combined with the low broken roofs of Spanish architecture. Here and there appeared the beautiful pines which suggested the blue of the Mediterranean and cliff villages, as pictured in paintings of Naples and southern Italy. Arriving in Toulouse about nine in the morning, we washed and had breakfast at a very pleasant hotel restaurant. It had the atmosphere of a good Paris restaurant, but the waitresses were of the brunette southern type, with sparkling eyes and impetuous activity. We liked it so well that we had all three meals there. At lunch, the table next to us was occupied by a good-looking gentleman with a dark moustache, who evidently was suing the favor of the proprietress’ very attractive daughter, therefore the waitress who attended him was gifted with ability and liberty. She caught the spirit of her position, and ushered in each new delicacy with a pomp and grimace, playing the part of bearer of the golden platter and king’s jester with a flippant coquetry and grace which was more entertaining than any show I’ve seen in France.

We spent the day in seeing the town. It is rich in monuments of history and art. The cathedral of St. Etienne is a monument of brick which opened to me a whole new field of possibility in the use of that material. It combines the mass of Romanesque with the Gothic form of an early vitality. The great basilica of St. Sernin is truly Romanesque and a perfect example of the Provincial style which introduced the Romanesque influence into France. We saw the paintings in the Hôtel de Ville, done by masters of the city of Toulouse, who were of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. These works were distinctly of the most modern school, and they appeal to me more than anything I ever have seen. Wonderful composition and lighting effect, combined with a freshness of color and naturalness which shows what really can be done with paint.

The large museum was in a great old monastery, built of hand-made bricks by the monks of St. Augustine in the ninth century. It is still beautifully complete, with cloistered court and brick-vaulted chapel. Past peoples live in monuments they leave. Monuments express the life and art and religion of a people. To build such monuments is the work of an architect. This is the greatest thing that ever happened to me. It shows me the purpose and benefit of education; for the rest of my life what I read will be absorbed with so much more interest and insight and profit. Maybe the course of technology is narrow and technical, but I find that never did I want to study and learn by reading as at present. It has waked me to the fact that I have tastes and the right to follow them as I please. And I can follow them in my many spare hours without detracting from my service in the Cause.