To the Last Man - Jeff Shaara [34]
His flexed his feet, the numbness just now wearing off. He was still not used to the bone-chilling cold of the air at high altitude, something Pourpe had once cautioned him about. Pourpe had rarely flown higher than a few thousand feet, had to stay within clear sight of his audience. Lufbery had watched alongside the awestruck spectators as Pourpe performed, dancing the plane in loops and spins and all manner of acrobatics. Even after so many months the show itself was unnerving to Lufbery, watching his friend stretch aircraft to the limit of their engineering, and sometimes beyond.
Lufbery’s fear had evolved into curiosity, and on a tour of Egypt, Pourpe had secured use of a two-seater, would finally allow his mechanic to experience the heights for himself. Pourpe knew what every pilot knows, that the first time a man feels himself leave the ground, there are two possibilities: he will be terrified, or he’ll feel the greatest thrill of his life. It did not surprise Pourpe that Lufbery had no fear at all. Instead, the mechanic marveled at the sights, as much as he marveled at the engineering that kept the plane in the air. It was a strange new experience for Lufbery, how the higher you flew, the thinner the air. He experienced the struggle to breathe, discovered with amazement how every little movement became an effort, the brain floating in some kind of stupor. Pourpe had warned him, if you weren’t careful, you might lose your senses completely. When Lufbery began to fly on his own, he experimented, testing his own limits, flying as high as the primitive planes would allow. It was pure fun at first, feeling his mind dissolve, testing how high he could go before dropping back down to heavier air. But the cold had been a shock, and despite Pourpe’s warning, Lufbery had been totally unprepared, had thought his feet would freeze completely away. Now, he wore the fur-lined boots, the same boots all the American pilots wore. No one else in the squadron seemed to complain. After every patrol, every pilot hopped down from his Nieuport with the same exhilaration. He had watched the others, listened to the talk as the heavy flying suits were peeled away, the boots yanked off. They wore nothing special inside the boots, the same thick wool socks he wore, and it had begun to infuriate him that they kept silent about the frozen agony of their toes. After three weeks in the squadron, he assumed it was his agony alone, some weakness that he dare not admit. He had witnessed too much of their teasing already, these pilots clearly a rowdy group, inspired to relentless taunting of any weakness any one of them might reveal. They might all have frozen toes, but if they weren’t going to admit it, he wouldn’t either.
He had been out on the early patrol, had followed DeLaage alongside Cowdin, and the new man, Charles Johnson. But with the patrol completed, the planes would not stay on the ground any longer than the mechanics required to refuel the tank, and, if necessary, reload the machine gun.
The Nieuport 11 was the smallest aeroplane Lufbery had ever flown. The French had nicknamed it the bebe, the pronunciation barely acceptable to men who considered themselves fighter pilots. No one wanted to fly anything called a baby. What the Nieuport 11 lacked in size, it made up for in power and maneuverability, the small craft capable of speeds over a hundred miles per hour, matching her with both the single wing Fokker Eindecker, as well as the new German two-winged Albatros. If the Nieuport had a weakness, it was firepower. Though the Germans had not invented the interrupter gear, they were perfecting it. Previously, it was impractical to mount a machine gun on the nose of the plane, since firing the gun would eventually destroy the plane’s own propeller. The French pilot Roland Garros had attempted to solve the problem by attaching steel plates to the inside of the prop, which would deflect those bullets that actually struck the blades. But Garros had been shot down, and both