CHAPTER IV

OFF FOR THE FRONT

Months passed.  The training of the Brighton boys went on steadily after they entered the service until each one of the six of them that were still at the home airdrome was a highly efficient flier and well-grounded in the construction of air-machines as well.

Louis Deschamps had gone, with his mother, to France.  Fat Benson had been passed on to a more important job.  His work had been so thorough in the stores department that he was now being used as an inspector, traveling over half a dozen states, visiting all sorts of factories that were being broken-in gradually to turn out the necessary aeroplane parts in ever-increasing quantities as the war progressed.

Then came the day when the contingent into which the Brighton boys had been drafted started, at last, for France.  Final good-bys were said, last parting tears were shed, the cheers and Academy yells at the station died into the distance as the train pulled out, and the six young airmen, proud in the security of full knowledge that they were no novices, were truly “off for the front.”

The days of embarkation, the dash across the Atlantic, and the landing in France came in due sequence.  They had expected some excitement on the ocean voyage.  The group of transports, of which their ship was one, steamed warily eastward, convoyed by a flotilla of grim destroyers, swift, businesslike, determined.  Extra precautions were taken in the submarine zone; but none of the German sea wolves rose to give battle with the American ships.

The coming into port, too, was less exciting than they had thought it would be.  The French people who were grouped along the quayside cheered and waved, but the incoming American contingents were arriving with such regularity that the strangeness had worn away.  America was in the war to do her utmost.  France knew that well by the time the Brighton boys crossed the ocean.  The welcome was no less warm, but there was no element of novelty about it.

A troop train, consisting mainly of cattle trucks, puffed away from the coast town next morning, and attached to it were the cars containing the new air squadron.  Late that night it had reached one of the huge airdromes, the vastness of which unfolded itself to the astonished gaze of the boys at daybreak of the morning after.  They had not dreamed that such acres and acres of hangars existed along the whole front.  The war in the air assumed new proportions to them.  They were housed in huts, warm and dry, if not palatial.

During the day, given leave to wander about the airdrome, the six Brighton boys took a stroll in company, eager to inspect at close quarters the latest types of flying machines.

“These airplanes are stronger than any we have ever seen,” remarked Joe Little, as they paused before a new-type French machine.