WAR

with Auger, Papa Dorme, Guynemer, Heurtaux; Spa 26, Lieutenant de la Tour;
Spa 73, Capitaine Deullin, his coolness was legendary; Spa 103, the youngest
squadron of the group, had originally been a bombing squadron, but its pilots
fought so well they had been converted to fighters en masse .
. .
The leader of Spa 103, to which Fonck was assigned, was Capitaine
d'Harcourt, an elegant gentleman, whose sharpest orders seemed like personal
pleas for favors no one could refuse.
The Storks had their traditions. Guynemer started one that everyone else
picked up. He would buzz the field after a successful fight and "blip" his engine:
BRMM! BRMM! BRMM! as if to say, "j'en ai un"—"l got one!"
Everyone but Dorme, of course. Papa Dorme would fly back and land with
no fuss and climb casually out of his machine. Usually, one could not tell
whether he'd been in a scrap by looking at it, because he never brought it back
with holes in it.
"Oh, yes," he would reply to questions. "I left one of 'em flaming at
such-and-such a spot." He would never say more. He never entered a claim. All
of his confirmed victories were reported by someone else, ground observers or
squadron mates. One day, a German radio broadcast announced that Dorme had
shot down a German aeroplane. Dorme hadn't said anything about it. He was
always the same, calm when he went out, calm when he came back, even after,
on one occasion, having lost his lower right wing through collision with a German
single-seater near Bapaume. Dorme habitually did his cruising about ten miles
behind the enemy lines, and his comrades insisted that his score must have been
at least 50.
Such were the Storks.
Brocard gave a crisp first interview to Fonck. "The only thing you are here
for is to shoot down Bodies. Report to 103." That was all.
Fonck's enthusiasm carried him clean out of the fight the first time he went
up as a Stork.
Familiarizing himself with the Spad and the lay of the land, he was circling
above the city of Rheims, lost in a daydream about the ancient and historic events
associated with the name of that city. He spotted a German two-seater about 3000
feet below him, and dived on it immediately, plunging past the machine before he
could even find it in his sight. By the time he had regained altitude the surprised
Boche had cleared out, leaving Fonck alone to curse himself for having acted
like
an irresponsible schoolboy.
The French, like the British and the Germans, had regularly scheduled
patrols to fly, depending on the requirements of the army corps whose fronts
they were to cover. Unlike the British and the Germans, however, the French
never officially discouraged solo patrols except at the discretion of local commanders
of squadrons or groups, so long as these independent and individual
undertakings did not conflict with the commitments of the squadron or group.
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