Two-Bladers, Four-Posters

WAR BIRDS--Diary of an Unknown Aviator--Doran ($3.50).* A glossy finish is not among this chronicle's properties. Not for effect but for grim, humorous, human record, and probably for relief, did the author set down in airmen's vernacular daily events and sensations from the day he sailed from Halifax to the eve of his death behind Germany's lines. Nor is it a philosopher's diary, but the blunt journal of a rather tough, inarticulate "war bird." He "laughs off" the emotion stirred in him by a full moon at sea, by guessing he needs "a little loving" and wondering about the trained nurses aboard. He records the deaths of comrades with as little flourish as he accords their myriad fly-by-night amours. "If these boys can fly two-bladers like they can fly four-posters there'll be a shortage of Huns before long." The irony of Death in a British training camp bears down heavily. Life, however, is simple: flying today, women tonight, tomorrow cannot be helped. It is not quite accurate to call the author unknown. Some of the men he names by name survived--piano-playing Larry Callahan of Chicago, for example; Violinist Albert Spalding; one-armed Alan Winslow; husky Dr. "Hash" Gile of Princeton and New York. They will applaud the terse descriptions of air action, heavily salted with realism and cynicism. They will admire Clayton Knight's sketches of havoc-ridden skies. They will remember the writer as they remember other men in his pages--big "Ros" Fuller, Clarence Fry, John Goad, "Hobey" Baker, "Micky" Mannock, superb Major Bishop (and his wife) and Pilot Springs, who flew with milk of magnesia in one pocket, gin in the other.

Many citizens were agog when War Birds first came among them. Mothers, sisters, wives--but most of all, neighbors--of the young men who years ago flew in France, affected surprise and concern upon discovering that it was not, after all, a very "nice" war. The young men hated their duty and believed, according to this writer, that the best talisman for an airman was "a garter taken from the left leg of a virgin in the dark of the moon."

-Published aerially by Liberty (weekly) last year.