Judging by the amount of it that fell their way, floor scrubbing had been proven an efficacious means of developing airsense in newly joined flying cadets. Before my first week in Toronto had passed I had scrubbed every floor in the Jesse Ketchum High School, Royal Flying Corps war-time depot, from which cadets were posted for fatigue duty to the flying camps at Borden and Deseronto, whence they emerged ready for the No. 4 S. of M.A., Canada's school of military aeronautics, usurper pro tem of Toronto University. Here a breathing spell was accorded them after their period of dry bread, watery soup and stews of questionable content, considered to contain enough vitaminestyping error in original. to carry them through six weeks of intensive drilling and every imaginable form of fatigue in kitchen, latrine and hangar. The S. of M.A. was famous for its cuisine—prepared by young Toronto ladies determined to do their bit, even if it was only catering to the appetities of ground aviators. And so agreeable was life—militarized though it had become—at the University of Toronto, so attractive, and such expert cooks were these young ladies, that at my advent there were still cadets there who had found it impossible to exchange a life of such ease for the hazards of the flying camps. One of them, a Mr. Grandy of New York, was supposed to have entered in Course 9 at the time Vernon Castle, O'Brien and other front-line pilots had taken their ground instruction.
In order to remain indefinitely at the S. of M.A. the procedure was simple enough. It consisted in getting on the right side of the sergeant-major—a question of finance, and missing or muffing examinations. But these exams could not be muffed or missed indiscriminately, or too often, under pain of being posted back to a fatigue camp—or without the cooperation of the S.M., who found ways and means of obtaining leave for favored cadets as their course examinations approached, or of insuring them temporary refuge behind the infirmary inmate's blue arm-band. Through sheer luck I had escaped the fatigue camps. Ten days after I reached Jesse Ketchum twentyfive smart looking cadets, graduated from the aerial-gunnery school at Beamsville, arrived to be formally commissioned. The investing officer, Lieutenant Smith, looked like David Powell, the motion picture star. I made a sketch of him which he saw. He sent for me.
"Look here," he said. "At Leaside we're making some enormous ground maps of the front-line trenches in color for the art-obsOriginal footnote by Ingram: "Artillery observation." course. You seem to know all about drawing. I suppose painting is pretty much the same sort of thing. If you want to get out of going to a fatigue camp—which I warn you is pretty bloody—I'll fix it for you to come out and work on these maps until it's time for you to go through to the S. of M.A."
I told him nothing would please me better.
"I seem to know your name," he said. "You're not an actor?"
"No, sir," I said. "I've been directing motion pictures. Before that I worked for a sculptor."
"Of course!" he said. "I saw that picture of yours with the monkey who poisoned someone ....Bloody marvelous! How the devil did you get him to do it?"
By the time I reached the S. of M.A. a couple of months later, I was already familiar with aerodromes, and had done some dual flying. Lieutenant Smith, Smiddy, as he was known, took me up regularly, looped me, spun me, whip-stalled me; and before I left Leaside had given me enough instruction to send me solo.
"It's a bloody shame I can't send you solo," he said. "You're quite ready for it now, and by the time you get to Borden or Deseronto you'll have lost the feel of the controls."
He gave me notes to a couple of friends of his at the S. of M.A., asking them to push me through to a flying camp as soon as possible. On his advice I had attended the machine gun classes at Leaside and learned to take a machine gun apart, and put it back just the same as it was; learned by heart, too, the sequences of the Vickers and Lewis guns. What Lewis gunner has forgotten:'On the cartridge being primed the cordite is turned into powered gas with a pressure of 19 tons to the square inch that forces the bullet down the barrel with a muzzle velocity of 2460 feet per second.'
On sleepless nights I still find myself repeating this and other sequences of the Lewis or Vickers guns.
Much as I enjoyed the S. of M.A., I was impatient to get back to a flying camp. Learning the mechanism of the Le Rhone or Clerget rotary motors by heart was less amusing than tinkering with carburetors, magnetos and spark plugs, swinging propellers, or joyriding. But I flunked my first examination. Though Smiddy had pronounced me all set for solo flying, motors and the theory of flight had stumped me. I had learned that flight was obtained through thrust and lift overcoming gravity and drift, but that was about all. And the Constantinesco synchonized gears, which made firing through the revolving blades of a propeller possible, completely mystified me. A mystification shared by H.M. King George V. up to the time of his silver jubilee Airforce display, if what I read in a topical newspaper article is correct. I quote from it: "Though machineguns rigged to fire through airplane propellers without hitting the spinning blades were among the first developments of the Great War, the King asked with his affection-winning candor: 'How is that possible?' His question having been answered at length, the sovereign chuckled contentedly:
'Soon I shall know all about these things!'"
Parade, anytime, anywhere is a boring ordeal. Now and then it has its diversions. At the S. of M.A. we had the sergeant-major's loud-speaker vocal apparatus which seemed to make the parade ground quake, and was popularly supposed to dislodge slates from the roof of commons. But even the S.M.'s repertoire was limited. He could not work up new dialogue for every parade.
The day General Hoare came to inspect us with a brace of red setters stands out, for one of the dogs, mistaking the shining field boots of the commanding officer for lamp-posts, telegraph poles, or whatever else he had been in the habit of using, acquitted himself nobly, as they say.
"Fall out that cadet!" shouted the sergeant-major another day. Nobody moved.
"Fall out that cadet!" he shouted again, dragging his game leg after him toward a tow-headed cadet in the front rank.
"Me, sir?" inquired the cadet timidly.
The S.M. consulted his note book, and though but a dozen paces from the cadet being addressed, roared:
"Fall out Cadet Toohy. J. 152906."
Cadet Toohy stepped smartly from the ranks and came to attention four paces from the S.M.'s stomach.
"What you doing on peraide?" shouted the S.M.
Cadet Toohy's mouth opened, but what he said was inaudible.
"Don't you know you been discharged, you knock-kneed malingering mother's mistake, you?"
"Discharged? Me, sir?"
"Cadet Toohy. J. 152906, your jooly signed discharge is on my desk... FALL OUT!"
Cadet Toohy stuck his hands in his pockets and for the first time, returned the S.M.'s stare, taking his time about it, too. He cleared his throat then and spat in the general direction of the S.M.'s boots.
"Well, you big dumbfaced bag of hot air, just take a good suckamy...for yourself," he said.
As he strolled whistling from the parade ground the C.O. arrived. Cadet Toohy saluted him thumb in nose. The disciplinarian C.O. stared after him confounded.
"Come here, that cadet!" finally burst from his throat in a kind of scream.
Glancing back over his shoulder Cadet Toohy. J. 152906 made a noise with his mouth, at the same time raising the back of his tunic, and continued on his way. As the C.O. took a step after him, malacca brandished, sergeant-majorial heels clicked behind him.
"Arrest that cadet!" cried the C.O.
"I'll phone for a policeman, sir," said the S.M.
"Policeman? Are you mad! Fall in two men. Arrest him now!"
"I regret to have to inform you, sir," said the S.M., "but this indivijool, being of civilian status, does not happen to come under military joorisdichun."
"What on earth are you saying?" said the C.O.
"Under age, sir. You signed his discharge this morning, sir. His mother is waiting now to take him back to the United States, sir."
It takes all kinds of people to make a flying corps. There was a cadet Wilson who had made up his mind to make commissioned instructors note that he was not as the rest of us. That he took a lively interest in the theory of flight, in the functioning (on paper) of rotary motors; that, in fact, he listened to and digested every dreary word of the daily spiel they droned at us automatically, which bored them no less than us. That these concentrational efforts should be duly remarked, he acquired a habit of rising, clicking his heels and firing a question at the lecturer as senseless as it was inopportune.
The M.O. was winding up his stock lecture on venereal diseases and the use of prophylactics. Some of us, like Grandy, had already dozed through it twenty times or more. The M.O. was stressing the importance of prophylactic injections within, at the maximum, four hours after sexual intercourse. Cadet Wilson's heels clicked. Grandy, next to me, sighed.
"Excuse me, sir," said Cadet Wilson. "But don't you think it would be a good idea to take one of these prophylactic injections—let us say once a month—even without having had intercourse with the opposite sex?"
"From a purely personal viewpoint, my reply would be NO," said the M.O.
"In the Imperial Army the more noise you make with your heels when you come to attention, the lesser the chance of it being noticed that the boots aren't shined," Cadet Grandy used to say. What Grandy got away with, even granting he had the S.M. fixed, was rather prodigious. At times, the S.M., to convince himself of his independence, would start something with Grandy. Missing him on parade one dismal drizzling morning, the S.M. sent an orderly after him. The orderly came back alone to say that Cadet Grandy regretted, but was indisposed.
"Fall in two men and bring him here under guard. I'll indispose him!" shouted the S.M.
This time Grandy came. But I never saw anyone looking less like a man under arrest. His uniform was supplemented by a canary yellow muffler twisted high about his throat. The flaps of his splitass cap were pulled down over his ears, and he was wearing goloshes. An umbrella shielded him from the rain. He came to attention before the S.M., the handle of the umbrella held on a level with his chin, sabrewise. He was unable to account for himself verbally, having lost his voice. But he was quite in order. He had reported for sick parade. Somehow his name had been omitted from the S.M.'s list. He handed the S.M. a slip signed by the M.O., which he could have sent along by the orderly in the first place.
"How do you get away with it, Grandy?" I asked.
He was sitting on the end of my bed—with another cadet we shared an undergraduate suite of two rooms. Grandy pointed to a thick red volume which lay neglected on a shelf.
"You are unfamiliar with it, of course?"
"It was issued to me when I got here," I said.
Grandy picked it up, patting the cover caressingly.
"The King's Rules and Regulations," he said. "I'm ready to bet you've never even glanced inside it. A better title, of course, would have been The Leadswinger's Manual. I'm probably the only person here, with the exceptions of the C.O. and the S.M., who has the vaguest idea of its contents. Its ambiguity, from the point of military law, has come to my rescue more than once. But even before I was thoroughly conversant with it, the very magic of its name saved me a lot of c.b. and docked pay. As you are aware, when infractions of these regulations occur, the orderly officer, before pronouncing sentence, is required to ask the accused rank if he has anything to say. Generally the accused rank hasn't and, even if he has, it makes no difference unless based upon some thing in this book, which it never is. Follows a seven days pay, seven days c.b., or worse on the crime sheets. Supposing, on the other hand, in a loud and assured voice the accused rank replies, for example: 'Yes, sir, I beg to refer you to page 182, section 581, paragraph B of His Majesty's Rules and Regulations'.? The chances are that there is not a K.R. and R. available. The orderly officer—often with his pips up about a month—neither knowing nor caring to know to what paragraph B, page 182 section 581 refers to, will avoid the issue with a: 'Case dismissed'."
Grandy held up the book.
"Comrade of the air," he said. "Take this priceless volume. Read, mark, learn and inwardly digest its contradictions and ambiguities. You will be struck by the number and variety of interpretations that can be placed upon the laws set forth in it, and by the different shades of meaning men of intellect, such as ourselves, may discover in an apparently straightforward statement—provided we are familiar with all that has gone before and all that comes after it."
He placed the K.R. and R. in my hands.
"Follow my advice," he said, "and if you reach ripe old age you will look back on your R.F.C. days as the easiest and happiest of your life, and you will think kindly of Harold Grandy, for whom the K.R. and R. solved the problem of serving as a cadet and, at the same time enjoying the privileges and liberty of a field officer."