Dastral of the Flying Corps

If he had consulted his own wishes he would much have preferred to remain with his comrades on the Somme, but a royal wish is an order, and, after all, perhaps the ten days' leave which had been granted to him would enable him to run north to visit his mother and friends in the little village in Yorkshire, and to gaze once again upon those blue, heather-tipped and bracing moorlands where he had spent his boyhood.

"Good-bye, Dastral. Don't stay too long in Old Blighty!" again shouted his friends, as the vessel sheered off and gained headway, and he had shouted back in reply:

"Cheer-o, boys! I shall soon be back again," waving his hand towards his comrades, as he bent over the rail.

As soon as they left the shelter of the breakwater a destroyer, waiting outside, sent up a couple of flags to her masthead.

"Send up the answering pennant, bosun!" cried the skipper of the mail-boat, when he saw the destroyer's signal, and immediately after he rang down to the engine room staff:

"Full steam ahead!" for the warship was there to act as escort, as there were very valuable mails aboard, and only two nights ago, the enemy's destroyers, breaking out of their base at Zeebrugge, had crept through the gap in the British mine-beds in the dark, and had sent two patrols and an empty transport to the bottom.

So, while the mail packet went full speed ahead, at twenty-four knots, the destroyer, with her superior speed, waltzed round her, like a dancing marionette, leaving a trail of white foam in her wake. This she continued to do all the way across the Channel, for it was known that several enemy submarines were lurking about the neighbourhood, watching through their periscopes for just such a target as the mail boat with her valuable cargo offered.

Very soon, however, the white cliffs of Dover appeared in sight, and when they entered the new naval harbour, the destroyer sheered off and went back to her station.

Dastral, having been recognised on the boat, had received several invitations to dine in London that evening, but all these he had courteously refused, although one of them had come from a Cabinet minister and his wife who were travelling on the same boat.

"No," he had said to himself, "there is poor old Tim Burkitt, my colleague, who is studying law at Gray's Inn. I will go and hunt him up. He will be glad to see me, and we will spend the night together at Hallet's."

Now Tim Burkitt, who suffered from a physical deformity, had been breaking his young heart ever since war broke out, for he had been rejected from every sphere of service in the great war, owing to his deformity. He had seen his chums depart from Gray's into the Army, the Navy and the Flying Corps, and he had been left behind almost alone.

He had been chummy with Dastral, for they came from the same village, had come up to London together, and had shared the same drab dull lodgings in the great city. Later he was destined to become a great lawyer, for nature had compensated him by granting him the gift of oratory, but he would have willingly given up all that if he could but have shared with Dastral his adventures and his triumphs.

This afternoon he had thrown aside his law books to read in the papers a vivid description of Dastral's fight with Himmelman, the German air-fiend, and the poor cripple, with tears of grief and envy at his own hard lot, but with his heart full of joy at his comrade's success had just thrown aside the paper, adding dejectedly:

"Oh, Dastral, how I would like to see you again! You were always a true friend to me"; when suddenly he heard a scamper of footsteps up the bare stone steps that led up to his chamber in Gray's, and the next instant the door flew open, and Tim found himself embracing his old colleague, with a warmth he had never exhibited before.

"Bravo, Dastral!" he cried again and again. "I knew you'd do it if you had half a chance. And to think you should remember me, a poor cripple, when all England is talking about you, and the King himself has sent for you."

"Here, stow it, Tim! Who do you think I should seek out first if not you? I've come to spend the afternoon and evening with you. To-morrow, after I have seen the King, I'm going home to Burnside, where you and I spent so many happy days, and I want you to come with me."

"Good! Splendid! How kind of you, old fellow! Then to-night we'll have a dinner all to ourselves at Hallet's. What say you?"

"Right you are, Tim," said Dastral, clapping his old colleague on the back, and making him the happiest fellow in all London for the nonce.

That afternoon the two chums had a quiet stroll around Gray's, and Lincoln's Inn Fields, then called on one or two acquaintances who had also been left behind in the Temple. A visit to the Old Mitre of sacred memory, and a quiet smoke in Johnson's Corner at the "Cheese" in Fleet Street, passed away the hours of the golden afternoon, and the evening found them snugly ensconced at Hallet's, where, in the days gone by, they used to celebrate any little event in their lives by a special dinner.

Never for a moment did the conversation flag. The two chums unbosomed themselves to one another, except that Dastral would not talk about his adventures since he became a pilot in the Flying Corps, for the members of this Corps never seek advertisement, preferring that the record of their Homeric deeds should all go down to the credit of the Corps, rather than to any particular individual.

"But, Dastral," Tim would urge, as the plates and dishes disappeared and another course was laid, "you must have had a hundred amazing adventures since I saw you last. Just tell me about one of them, say your fight with Himmelman!"

"Bah! It was nothing, Tim–nothing, I mean to make a song about. If I could write and speak like you, now, I might be able to make a tale about it. But nature hasn't gifted me that way," replied the pilot.

"But don't you feel the romance and glory of it all, fighting a battle in the air at ten thousand feet?"

"Romance, glory?" laughed Dastral. "There is no romance or glory about war, when you are in it. It is horrid and brutal then. You must be miles away to see the romance of it. It is all an ugly business."

Tim couldn't understand him. He just couldn't, but he had one more shot. "Don't you feel like singing sometimes, when you are up in the azure, mounting in circles like a lark to meet the sun, and the heavens are calling you?" he asked.

"Ah, when I am ten thousand feet up, and the engines are running smoothly, it is heavenly. I feel like music and romance then. The song of the propellors is beautiful, and the beating of the engine makes me imagine all sorts of weird things, but when I come down to the earth again I forget all the things I would say. It is wonderful though, that call of the heavens; the call of the wild, as the gipsies say, isn't in it. But I cannot describe it."

And so they talked on for an hour–two hours, long after the table had been cleared, making rings of smoke into which Tim Burkitt at least, with his rich imagination, saw wonderful things, when suddenly something happened which made them both spring to their feet–the electric lights went out, leaving them in utter darkness for a couple of minutes.

"What is the matter?" cried half a dozen voices, as soon as the waiter appeared with a lamp in his hand, which he immediately placed upon the centre table.

"There is a rumour, sir, that the Zeppelins are to make an attack upon London to-night, and the electric current has been turned off at the main," replied the jovial, beefy-faced waiter, adding with a smile, as he returned for another lamp, "What are we a-coming to?"

At this announcement several people at once took their departure, evidently thinking that Hallet's would be the first place to invite the attention of the raiders, and one or two ladies fainted and had to be helped out by their friends.

A strange and eager look came into the eyes of Dastral at the word Zeppelin. Tim noted it at once, and wondered what his colleague was thinking about, for, though his gaze was eager and keen, there was a far away look in his eyes. At the end of a minute he half uttered the word:

"Zeppelin!"

Then he rose to his feet, but recalling himself almost with a jerk to the fact of Tim's presence, he said apologetically,

"I say, old fellow, we've had a jolly time, but I think I must leave you, though it almost breaks my heart to do so."

"Go? Where to, Dastral? I thought you were going to spend the night at my rooms, and it's barely nine o'clock yet. Sit down, old man. You haven't got the Zeppelin fright as well, have you? If you have, here are my smelling salts–here, take a sniff now."

For answer Dastral burst into a roar of laughter. Then subsiding quickly, he said, in a more serious tone, bending low to whisper his words in Burkitt's ears:

"I have never yet fought a Zeppelin, except the lame duck we brought down near Brussels. I would give all I possess to go up and fight one. And during the last minute I have been wondering how it can be done."

"Well, how can you do it?"

"That's the trouble. I'm not attached to any Wing or Squadron in England. But a friend of mine has just recently returned from France, and has been appointed Commanding Officer of the –th Squadron, with its aerodrome about fifteen miles away from here. I must get into touch with him, if possible."

The next moment Dastral was engaged on the 'phone, trying in the dark to find his friend somewhere at the other end of the wires. After some ten minutes he managed it.

"Hullo! Hullo! Are you there?" he asked.

"Yes, who are you?" came the reply.

"I want the O.C. of your Squadron at once, please."

"He is busily engaged, and I cannot disturb him now, unless it is something of the highest importance. Hurry up, please, and tell me who you are, and give me your message. The wires are urgently wanted to-night."

"I am Dastral, Flight-Commander Dastral of the –th Squadron, –th Wing, and I have just come from France."

"What! Beg pardon, sir. Dastral. Not the pilot who fought with Himmelman?"

"Yes."

"Hold the line a minute, sir."

Twenty seconds later the O.C. of the Squadron himself was at the end of that line.

"Hullo! Is that you, Dastral?"