WAR

Ball was awarded the M.C. for his efforts just prior to the Battle of the
Somme; and during July 1916, the first month of the battle, he flew so arduously
that he was forced to ask for a rest around the beginning of August. Instead of
being given a leave he was reassigned to a two-seater squadron to fly B.E.'s again
on artillery-spotting missions. This was no rest, certainly, and he preferred to fly
a Nieuport, if he had to fly operationally, rather than a B.E. where he was
nothing but an Aunt Sally for the German Archie.
Back he went to No. 1 1 Squadron—at least it was better than being a sitting
duck. One day in August he lit into a formation of five German two-seaters and
forced three of them to the ground. A few days later, the day after his twentieth
birthday, he was out prowling the lines
alone, looking for trouble when he sighted
a flight of seven two-seaters in a V-formation,
like a flock of wild geese. He
sailed into them and shot one of them
down with a burst of about 20 rounds.
The two-seaters scattered in all directions.
He spotted another formation of
five and repeated the performance with
the same results up to a point. After a
short burst one of the planes went down,
but the rest of the formation, instead of
scattering, pounced on Ball. He headed
straight for the nearest one and blazed
away. The machine dropped abruptly, but
Ball was too busy to see if it crashed.
The whirling fight worked lower and
lower and Ball fired his last five or ten
rounds into another machine which tore into a house and exploded. He was out
of ammunition and the fight was over. He headed home hedgehopping, but nobody
felt like chasing him.
He flew almost every day during the remainder of August and the following
month. He had a more or less
permanent roving commission and he accumulated
an extraordinary number of hours in the air. His flying was not so dashing as that
of some pilots—he was called a "careful" flyer—but his marksmanship was unerring,
his reflexes fast and his eyesight keen. His nerves remained steady in
spite of the exhausting pace he kept and the strain of feeling "utterly rotten," as
he put it in letters, every time he scored a victory.
The nervous strain of combat flying in the Great War was terrible at times,
and little has been said about it, but much has been implied. The aviators of those
years were the first professionals in a new profession. Powered flight was 10
years old, and until the war came along there had been little change in aeroplane
design or performance. Only a handful of flyers had dared anything more than
getting up and getting down: Garros flying across the Mediterranean; Bleriot
91
Roland CL 11.
The two-seater type Ball
encountered frequently
on the Somme in
August 1916.