WAR

Fonck was out alone on May 5, 1917, just ten days after having joined the
Storks, and two days after having scored his first victory with them. (That first
victory had made up for his blunder over Rheims.) He was just north of Laon,
picking his way through a sky completely filled with large, irregular patches of
cloud. There were no solid layers, just puffs and balls of cloud all around. As
he turned a corner, so to speak, he stumbled into the midst of a fight. Five
Albatros and an equal number of Nieuports were wheeling in and out of the
clouds in a tightly packed melee where each instant, it seemed, brought the risk
of collision. A Boche flashed in front of him at point-blank range, just as if it
had materialized out of the air. Fonck fired without taking time to think and the
machine abruptly dived straight down through the clouds. He threw a burst in
the direction of two Albatros on the tail of one of the French scouts, then he
was in cloud. He lost contact with the fight as suddenly as he had found it, and
almost as soon. He dived toward the ground looking for a sign of the machine
at which he had first fired. It had crashed in a wood near Laon.
Fonck was not overly superstitious, but he did set great store by a mascot
he had, a stork given him by a Madame Herriot of Lyon. One man of the
squadron was superstitious about the number 13, however, a pilot named Girval.
He once commented on the fact that there were 13 pilots of the squadron at a
dinner at Villers-Cotterets. "For the Chinese," he said, "thirteen at the table
means that one of the number will die within the year. For us, however, this can
have little significance since a year from now certainly more than one of us
is going to be dead." Poor prophetic Girval; of the thirteen, he was the first to go.
One of the next was Papa Dorme, shot down on May 25, 1917. Dorme
defied the odds many times and got away with it, but it wasn't the odds that
caught up with him, for his last fight was an even match.* C'est la guerre, said
the Storks, it being an unwritten but inviolable law that losses were not to be
discussed except clinically. None of them expressed any grief over the death of
the big,
calm, smiling man—he was only a few years over the average age in the
Groupe, but those few years earned him the
"Papa."
Fonck was on leave at the time and, safe from the eyes of the rest of the
men, gave way to a very human grief, but showed nothing of it when he returned.
The German two-seaters enjoyed one advantage when they came over the
lines early in the morning. If they came over at dawn, they had the sun at their
backs. Thus, it was difficult for the French chasseurs to surprise them unless
they hunted far on the other side of the German lines; but even so while the sun
was low, it was almost impossible to catch the Germans unawares since an attack
out of the sun had to be delivered at roughly the same level as that at which the
two-seaters were cruising. A fast diving attack was not impossible, but it was
ineffective as far as surprise was concerned. Still, there were ways to get them. If
you had sharp eyes, you could spot aeroplanes a mile away before their pilots
you, and then it was a matter of stalking them, knowing what they were going
to do, and good shooting.
* Kroll and von Schleich are both credited with this victory.
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