Dinsmore Ely

November 15, 1917.

Dear Father:

Where the sky turns from an azure blue to a rosy pink the delicate new moon rests with its points toward the evening star. From these two jewels of heaven, the sunset sky grades away to a misty, mysterious horizon. The gray distance is offset with a delicate lacework of the autumn-stripped hedge of poplars with their slim, graceful lattice work, reaching to points in the pink, and where the dark earth and the white road come to the foreground, two great apple trees with their gnarled autumn boughs frame the scene of simple beauty as it fades to night. As I entered the kitchen of a little old farm house, which people who eat there choose to call the “Aviator,” cheery voices and appetizing odors greeted me in preparation for the evening meal. The clean tile floor, the whitewashed walls, the low-hung, richly stained rafters, and the old walnut chest by the brick fireplace all made me think of Aunt Maggie’s old kitchen where the pies and the cookies were kept, and that makes me think of other fireplaces and other rafters – and the folks at home.

So I just sit down to the oilcloth-covered table and try to tell them what a restless, twentieth-century lad thinks of the environment of his parents’ childhood.

Dinsmore.

Dear Family:

Today started out very foggy, because there was no wind. We stood in the field till one o’clock waiting for the air to clear. I got a machine by four. The next hour contained enough excitement to do for the day. The planes are like mad little Indian ponies turned loose in the field – or, better still, like Pegasus bound into the air with a spirit that must be tamed by steady nerves and gentle hand. It is hard to describe just the feeling which possesses one. We are taught the principles and the movements that control the machine and then we are sent alone into the air to find an understanding of them. Perhaps you are turning a corner at an angle of forty-five degrees on the bank. Suddenly you feel something is wrong. The wind whistles louder than usual. Is it because you are pointing nose down, or are you sliding out over the rim of the curve, or down into the center of it? It is one of the three, and to correct the wrong one is to make worse the other two, yet the correction must be made. Now it is too late to figure it out, so you just correct it without thinking, and wonder which fault it was. In an animal we call it instinct, but there is an instant there which, when it passes, leaves a vacuum in the nervous system. The machine climbs like a tiger, and as we are not yet permitted to cut down the gas, it takes much strength to hold its nose down. I made fifteen five-minute rides, and now I’m pleasantly tired and relaxed.

I had ten rides in the eighteen-meter Nieuport and am getting the run of it. It is one of the most difficult machines to drive. I had bad luck in motors or would have finished today. My motor stopped twice when I was twenty-five meters from the ground, but I landed without mishap. With these machines the wing area is so small you head almost straight for the ground and just straighten out in time to land. You make a tour of five or six miles and mount a thousand feet into the air in five minutes – but you will be tired of reading this sort of thing very soon. The thing to do is to go to some aviation field and see it all done.

One of father’s letters arrived with a lot of clippings in it. Those clippings are very interesting. I enjoy them much more than the papers. The Saturday Evening Post is read from cover to cover and passed about till the pages are thin, so it would fill a big demand. Another book on aviation came. I have not yet had time to finish the first one. As they go into the technical end of things rather deeply, I can only study a small amount at a time. Most of my reading lately has been history.

Dins.Bourges, November 7, 1917.

Dear Family:

I am at Bourges on my way to Avord after my happy permission in Paris. As there were no train connections I had to stay here over night. Well, last Sunday we went to an American church, with an all-American service. It seemed rather pleasant. In the afternoon we went to the Opéra Comique to see Werther and Cavalleria Rusticana. They were both splendid and included some of the best stars. Oh, how I love the opera!

… I spent Monday afternoon in roaming about Paris. I went to the Louvre and Gardens of the Tuileries and Luxembourg, and to several of the less important churches. I saw St. James’s church from the tower of which the bells were rung as a signal on the night of St. Bartholomew. I believe I know Paris and its sights better now than Chicago, not that I have seen everything – one could never do that – but just the general layout. I never will get tired raving about the architecture.

My train leaves soon.

With love,Your Son.November 10, 1917.

Dear Father:

Yours of October 13 received. The letters of my family are of more interest and intimacy than ever before. You say I should be glad you are not in the machine with me to give me advice, but I say unto you, “You are the one to be glad.” If you are worried by the thought of what might happen if a steering buckle in an automobile should break, how would you feel to be hanging on wires and compressed air? Once in the air it is a fool’s pastime to think of what might happen. The god of luck is the aviator’s saint. Man pits his resource against the invisible, and never for an instant doubts his ability. Those who doubt are probably those who do not come back. They are much in need of Nieuport pilots, and rushing us through as fast as weather permits.

Cannot write tonight as everybody is telling flying stories.

Good night,Your Son.November 12, 1917.

Dear Bob:

Your letter came yesterday, and as I am in a great writing mood tonight I shall answer it. First, to tell you what we are doing. We are now back at the school of Avord. Here we learn to fly the Nieuport. A year ago that was the fastest plane at the Front and they still use them as fighting planes. First we ride in double command “twenty-eight’s.” (Twenty-eight means twenty-eight meters square of wing surface.) Then we do “twenty-three” double command and then are cut loose on them. Lastly, we finish with twenty rides solo in an “eighteen.” I finish the “twenty-eight” class tomorrow and will be through at this school in ten days. The eighteen-meter machines land at ninety miles an hour. They are wonderful little things and will do anything in the air. We go to work at six in the morning, and return at six in the evening, but the hardest work is waiting when there is too much wind to fly. We build a fire and sit about telling stories and making toast. When we cannot get bread we just tell stories. When it rains we go in the tent and read. I am reading a history of France. It is more fun to read history than to study it, and I think you know more when you get through. Of course I am surrounded by all the old castles and battle grounds and graves of the warriors of seven centuries. That makes a difference.

There was a bad accident the week before I got here. A two-passenger plane struck a solo plane in the air. It was a head-on collision, and all three aviators were killed. That is a very rare accident, though.

I see America is preparing for five years of war. You may get over yet. Write me whenever you can. You do not know how much your letters help to buck up a lonely brother sometimes.

Your ever loving brother,Dins.November 13, 1917.

Dear Mother:

Today was a wonderful, clear, crisp November day, and we breathed our fill of it. I had seven rides in a twenty-eight meter and one in a twenty-three meter Nieuport. In life the things we look forward to usually fall below our expectations, but not so in aviation. In aviation, every experience so totally eclipses all expectations that you realize you were totally incapable of imagination in that field. We change planes five times in progressing from Penguin to Spad. Each change is as great an advance and difference as stepping from a box car to a locomobile limousine with Westinghouse shock absorbers.

The Nieuport is the plane we are using now, with a man to give the scale. It has a supporting area of twenty-three square meters. It is the fighting plane used at the Front seven or eight months ago.

Dinsmore.November 15, 1917.

Dear Mother:

Things are going quite well. Day before yesterday I left the twenty-eight meter Nieuport class and today finished the twenty-three meter class and was advanced. Tomorrow I shall finish solo work on the twenty-three’s and take up eighteen’s. The monitors seem to think my work fairly good. The little eighteen-meter Nieuports are great. They are small and racy, with a wing spread of twenty-five feet. They have fine speed and land at eighty-five miles an hour. You land by cutting off the power and pointing the nose for the ground. By pulling the tail down she slows up and finally drops a yard to the ground. It is a very precise sport.

You would like it fine above the clouds, Mother. It is most beautiful and dazzling as the sun’s rays bounce along on the snowy billows, and you can swoop down and skim the crest of the cloud waves till the frost turns the wires to silver and your cheeks sting red in the mist.

Dinsmore.Ecole d’Aviation, Pau, November 22, 1917.

Dear Father:

This is the most pleasantly situated and best regulated camp I have been in yet. Pau itself is on a little plateau overlooking a valley with a river and surrounded by the foothills of the Pyrenees. On the sky line to the south and west of the beautiful snow-capped peaks, 4,000 feet high.

In this environment we are to attain proficiency in the handling of the war plane. The trip down from Avord was a tedious one, with a pleasant break of day at Toulouse. I came down with two Frenchmen who were excellent company. We spent two nights on the train. All the sleeping cars are used at the Front to carry wounded, so we slept sitting up. Sleeping cars are not so common in Europe, I guess. When I woke up yesterday morning the character of the country had changed from the rolling valleys of Touraine to the more rocky and broken country of Toulouse. The buildings were brick instead of stone, and one could see the round arch and barrel vault of Romanesque influence, combined with the low broken roofs of Spanish architecture. Here and there appeared the beautiful pines which suggested the blue of the Mediterranean and cliff villages, as pictured in paintings of Naples and southern Italy. Arriving in Toulouse about nine in the morning, we washed and had breakfast at a very pleasant hotel restaurant. It had the atmosphere of a good Paris restaurant, but the waitresses were of the brunette southern type, with sparkling eyes and impetuous activity. We liked it so well that we had all three meals there. At lunch, the table next to us was occupied by a good-looking gentleman with a dark moustache, who evidently was suing the favor of the proprietress’ very attractive daughter, therefore the waitress who attended him was gifted with ability and liberty. She caught the spirit of her position, and ushered in each new delicacy with a pomp and grimace, playing the part of bearer of the golden platter and king’s jester with a flippant coquetry and grace which was more entertaining than any show I’ve seen in France.

We spent the day in seeing the town. It is rich in monuments of history and art. The cathedral of St. Etienne is a monument of brick which opened to me a whole new field of possibility in the use of that material. It combines the mass of Romanesque with the Gothic form of an early vitality. The great basilica of St. Sernin is truly Romanesque and a perfect example of the Provincial style which introduced the Romanesque influence into France. We saw the paintings in the Hôtel de Ville, done by masters of the city of Toulouse, who were of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. These works were distinctly of the most modern school, and they appeal to me more than anything I ever have seen. Wonderful composition and lighting effect, combined with a freshness of color and naturalness which shows what really can be done with paint.

The large museum was in a great old monastery, built of hand-made bricks by the monks of St. Augustine in the ninth century. It is still beautifully complete, with cloistered court and brick-vaulted chapel. Past peoples live in monuments they leave. Monuments express the life and art and religion of a people. To build such monuments is the work of an architect. This is the greatest thing that ever happened to me. It shows me the purpose and benefit of education; for the rest of my life what I read will be absorbed with so much more interest and insight and profit. Maybe the course of technology is narrow and technical, but I find that never did I want to study and learn by reading as at present. It has waked me to the fact that I have tastes and the right to follow them as I please. And I can follow them in my many spare hours without detracting from my service in the Cause.

Your letter containing clippings and cartoons was very entertaining. I believe cartoons serve the purpose of keeping alive the trend of public thought without being filled up with unreliable censored facts and rumors.

Love to you all.

Your son,Dinsmore.November 29, 1917.

Dear Family:

Today was Thanksgiving, and we all had the very pleasant surprise of a day of repos given us by the captain that we might be present at a banquet given us by the American colony at Pau. It was held at one of the good hotels and had all the proper characteristics of a regular Thanksgiving dinner. There were forty-two of us there. After the meal we had some songs from local talent, which were of no mean variety, and then we went to a moving picture show which was rather a failure except as a place to digest an excellent and more than hearty meal.

My, but the machines we have now are a joy to run. They climb, they turn, they dive, and recover as you think. You have but to wish in the third dimension and you are there. It is beyond description. You sit comfortably behind a little windshield without glasses and watch the country far below. You forget the motor and space, and speed until suddenly something of interest causes you to lean out and you are struck in the face by a gust of wind which bends your head back and pumps your breath back into your lungs. Then you know what speed means. Soon your motor begins to miss, and you become worried and look for a place to land. You find the fields not more than one hundred feet square. You glance at the altimeter and find that you have unconsciously climbed to an altitude where the air is light, and your motor pants, so you make a readjustment, glance back at the school fifteen miles behind, which you left eight minutes ago, and go on your way.

Tomorrow I do spirals in fifteen-meter machines, and then go to vol de group. There we learn to fly in group formation and keep relative positions. They play “follow the leader” and “stump” in that class – some class! Then come acrobatics.

Dins.

Dear Family:

This is a country of beautiful views, wonderful colorings of distant hills and the snow-capped mountains as changeable as the sea. We fly among the foothills and look down upon the beautiful estates and castle ruins nestling among them. There has been little sun, but the fact that one catches but passing glimpses of the mountains among the clouds does not detract from their charm, and the moisture in the air makes the coloring richer. I am in no hurry to leave.

Erich Fowler, one who has been with us from the beginning, and one of our best liked and most congenial fellow-sportsmen, was the first among our crowd to be killed. He fell five hundred meters with full motor and did not regain consciousness. It is believed he fainted in the air, as the controls were found intact and no parts of the machine missing. He was buried today at Pau. When the fellows find no way to express their feelings it is taken laconically, and the subject has been dropped already. No one is unnerved or frightened by the experience. Fortunately the ego is strong enough in every man to make him feel the fault would not have been his in such a case, and he believes in his own good fortune enough to be confident nothing will happen to his machine.

This is the school where the poor aviators are weeded out. The men who have dissipated relentlessly have lost their nerve and dropped out. The poorer drivers have voluntarily gone to bombing planes. The physically unfit have dropped off in the hospitals, and here those who have not the head to fly come to grief. Four out of five of the Russians who enter this school leave in a hearse. Some national characteristic makes it almost impossible for them to complete the course.

Out of twenty-five machines broken in a fall, one man is killed. Out of ten men killed, nine deaths are caused by inefficiency on the part of the pilot. They say I have more than the ordinary allotment of requirements of a good pilot. My assets are perfect health and a clear mind to offset the chance of misfortune which may stand against me. Knowing me, realize that all the statements I have made are conservative.

In a letter I received from Viscountess Duval the other day she said: “As you are interested in art, it will be a pleasure to show you through our galleries when you come to Paris. They are as fine as any in the city.” Her husband is evidently a writer of some distinction. They are coming to Pau and I hope will arrive before I leave.

I shall be quite busy for the next week and not have a great deal of time to write. No letters have reached me from home for over three weeks.

Yours with love and wishes for a very Merry Christmas.

Your son,Dinsmore.

Not till the last line did I realize that Christmas was so near. Naturally, the war Christmas will be more conservative than ever, but I hope that real festivities will continue. America is far enough from the Front to keep the sound of battle from breaking the rhythm of the dance. I should like to be back there for three or four days of the Christmas vacation, with a fair round of dancing and turkey and calling on old friends. I shall make every effort to spend Christmas at my marraine’s.

My present to mother is a silver frame containing a picture of her son in war array of leathers and furs, helmet and goggles, standing by the propeller of France’s fastest war plane. To father I give my croix de guerre representing the first Boche I brought down, and to Bob goes a penholder shaped like a propeller and made from a splinter of the propeller of my first Boche plane – all imaginary gifts, but true.

Your son,Dinsmore.December 1, 1917.

Dear Bob:

Your letter written November 10 came yesterday with a lot of other letters and about five packages. Gee! it was just like Christmas. We all sat about the stove and ate nuts and dates, figs and candy, till our stomachs ached. You can’t appreciate what wonderful and necessary things figs and prunes are till you go without sweet things by the month. Take a prune, for instance. If I could have a candied prune for every mile I walked, I would use up a pair of shoes every week. Myrtle sent me three cans of salted nuts; and a girl in Boston sent me a surprise package.

Well, Bob, I am a real pilot now. I can play “stump the leader” with anybody. Turning loops and somersaults and corkscrew turns are nothing any more. The hardest things to do are the “roundversments,” “barrel roll” and “vertical bank.”

Here they give us a machine and we go up and do what we like for two hours. One day I went ’way up over the mountain peaks and circled close around the highest one; then I went down in the valleys and played chicken hawk over the villages and followed the railroad train down the valley. You should see the cows and sheep run when my shadow crossed their fields. You can head right for the mountainside and then whirl around and skim along with the fir trees passing close by – twice as fast as an express train.

Inside the machine the seat is comfortable and you huddle down behind the windshield as comfortable as can be. The wind roars by so loudly that it drowns out the noise of the motor. Before long your ears are accustomed to the sound and you feel as if you were slipping along as silently as a fish.

Another day we went sixty-five miles to Biarritz. It is a bathing resort on the ocean. I went down over the ocean and circled around the lighthouse on the way back and then sped down the beach just over the water line. I didn’t see any submarines, but maybe they saw me first and beat it. I got back to the school just before dark and didn’t have gasoline enough left to go five miles. They gave it to me for being gone so long, but it was a great trip. The next day I tried for an altitude and made next to the highest in this school – 6,500 meters or 21,320 feet. It wasn’t much joy. I froze three finger tips and frosted my lungs I think, and had chills and headache till supper time. For an hour I pounded my hands together while steering with my knees. There were six strata of clouds. The last was above me and at the top. I didn’t see the ground for an hour and a half. When you realize that they do their fighting between five and six thousand feet, you see what endurance it will take. They are right to make the test high for aviators.

The most fortunate of us are being sent to Cazaux on the coast near Bordeaux. There they have all kinds of target practice from an aeroplane. You shoot at floats in a lake by diving at them, and at sausages dragged through the air by another plane. Well, we have done some of that here. We went up and dropped a parachute and then pretended it was a German plane and dived at it back and forth. Believe me, it was no easy matter to aim a gun into that machine while you are diving down at a speed of 250 miles an hour. Then we go in pairs for team work and dive at it turn about.

The last few days we have been having a great time. We divided into two groups and called one the French and the other the Boche, and we go out and hunt each other up and down the valley. We have sham combats and keep our squadron formation during the maneuvers. We do this for ten days before going to Cazaux. I am unusually lucky to get so much of this training, and am pleased about it, though I’m afraid I’ll not be in Paris for Christmas. (I hope you will write and tell me about your dance and your Christmas holidays, and I’ll tell you what I do Christmas.) As for this war, I’m not saying a word, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you and your children would get a chance to fight in it. There have been hundred-year wars before now, and our modern civilization is not so small that it can’t reproduce what has been done before. But if every American has to return to the United States and start producing, raising, and training soldiers for the next fifty years to beat them, we’ll thrash them, by God, if it leaves America a desert and Germany a hole in the ground.

The shoes the family sent me are a perfect fit and just what I wanted, and the socks were a surprise. As for that surprise box, I will continue to enjoy that for many a day. I ate a little and passed around a little each day.

Good night, Bob.

Don’t lose any sleep over studies.

Your loving brother,Dins.Merry Christmas – Happy New YearDecember 6, 1917.

Dear Family:

The past few days have been wonderful in weather and accomplishments. I have been seeing southern France at the rate of a hundred miles an hour – five hours a day. Yesterday morning I flew to Notre Dame de Lourdes. It is a place to which thousands pilgrimage each year to be healed by the flow of waters there. It is a beautiful little village at the base of the mountains, and is hidden in the shadow of steep cliffs. From there I wandered among the foothills and circled over the little mountain hamlets. In the afternoon I headed straight for Pic du Midi. It is the second highest mountain in this vicinity. In three-quarters of an hour I was a thousand meters above it. I swooped down around it and took pictures, with it in the foreground. Then I came back by way of another canyon, and arrived at the school at dusk. After a lot of foolish monkey business, I spent the last hour running at a height of two hundred feet with my motor throttled ’way down. Sitting low in my seat, hardly touching the controls, skimming the tree tops in the quiet hazy evening air, it made me think of how father used to love to see the old White throttle down to two miles an hour, the difference being that I had throttled down to ninety.