Chapter Thirty-Seven
The Machine-Gun Mystery
It’s disturbing, the way military decorations are so coveted by men. Billy Bishop, by some accounts, was a very ambitious young man. So what? So am I. But I have often wondered if the intimidation of class-conscious British society was a factor in his psychological make-up. All of us arrived there at a young and rather impressionable age.
Guys like Bishop, or Major William Barker, coming from the Dominions, sometimes found that the Brits didn’t take them too seriously, or treated them as unwashed and unwelcome.
The desire to wipe someone’s face was overwhelming at times. Society has few outlets for the naturally-aggressive person. There’s hockey, of course, but there is also hunting, or business, or other, ‘games,’ for want of a better word.
For myself, there is no substitute for physical action.
It’s perfectly understandable why fighter pilots over-claim. When everyone else in the room has an exciting story to tell, you have to compete for attention and recognition. And for the most part, pilots are driven individualists. A certain very confident personality type.
What happened to Bishop’s machine gun? He was flying a Nieuport, a scout aircraft, returning after a middle-of-the-night, solo attack on a German aerodrome. It fell off.
He said it got stuck, in the pointing-up position, right in front of his face. He rolled the plane inverted, gave it a yank and jettisoned it. It’s a real pain in the ass to try and fly like that. I don’t even want to try it. You don’t want to land at night with that up there.
Too much chance of smashing all your teeth out.
If I had to dismount a machine gun in mid-air, I would remove the firing cable.
Billy.
No sense having the gun flopping around still attached to the aircraft.
I would put the safety on.
No sense in having it whack the tail and let off a round or two into the back of your head as it flies away. I would remove a clip that held the gun to the mounting quadrant.
Bearing in mind that the SE-5a’s we were flying, and the Nieuport, each had different types of mount.
If that gun was stuck in front of my face, I would indeed have rolled inverted and hoped it fell off. In order to mount the gun on an SE-5, the gun was placed in this position, then slid up into its forward-firing position. This was the only position safe to fly, in almost any condition except instant use against an overhead enemy.
Personally, I never tried to use the gun in this position, and never flew the Nieuport.
You can see the mount in photos, in any popular (bad) history book. The gun would have been installed by ground personnel standing beside the plane. For the Nieuport, they used a small stepladder.
If Bishop rolled inverted, and put in a little down-stick, the gun should have sailed off into space, arguably with enough momentum to rip the cable loose.
A trained gunner on the ground could have put a tight little grouping into his rear fuselage. This might have happened while the plane was in a stalled state, or perhaps climbing out, and thus it would have had little forward motion relative to the ground fire. He might have been upside-down when it happened. Even on an aircraft, entry holes can be distinguished from exit holes. The ground experts couldn’t come up with anything other than ‘inconclusive.’
One of their theories was that he landed at a French aerodrome, and shot up his own plane. That would have been an unnecessary complication. Their theory was that he couldn’t get the gun mounted again. If he really wanted to fake it, all he had to do was to fly around in the dark for a couple of hours, dump his war-load and come home.
Nobody is that fucking dumb.
Someone would have remarked upon it sooner.
If it were put to a vote, most people would prefer Billy to remain a hero. The fact that a man can even consider whether he is worthy of receiving the Victoria Cross says something about his makeup, his personality. Most guys were concerned with making it through to another day. And just staying alive.
Did Bishop get up in the morning and say to himself, “Better get a couple more kills, or the buggers will never give me my VC?”
All I can say as a disinterested observer is, “Blow me.”
You can quote me on that.
Did Bishop come up with the idea, ‘Hey. I know what. I’ll just go over there and bomb that little aerodrome single-handed? Then they won’t be able to deny me my VC?’
‘Blow me.’
Is bravery the absence of fear? Or is bravery when a man is scared shitless, and goes over the top when ordered, or asked, by his commander?
What is courage? In the final analysis, a hero is a man who had no choice but to act, when other guys preferred to stay in bed or just plain keep their heads down. How comfortable was Bishop, as a man inside of his own skin? Did he prize the truth, more than he wanted the VC?
A guy called ‘Pappy’ once told me, “If they knew what a louse I was, they never would have made me a hero.”
Now that guy had a sense of honor about the truth. A sense of humor. He knew there were more deserving men than him. Did Bishop ever ask himself that? I wonder.
I have asked myself that question.
The answer is, “Of course,” but I can’t speak for Billy.
Not really.
Those little details, and I think people were just jealous.
So in addition to planning and launching the sound detector mission, we had to figure out the machine gun mystery. First the science. We took twenty-five guys and flipped the plane over, which we had to do nose first, then we lifted it up onto some big sawhorses a carpenter-type whacked up. We had the plane inverted, in a nose-up position. We put the rear fuselage in a padded cradle. The time-consuming part of the operation was draining the fuel, the oil, and the coolant. Better than having it splash all over the place. We used a lot of sawhorses and a lot of pillows for padding under the wing.
Then Howard-Smythe and Bernie took turns. We had the gun in the forward position, and they used a walking stick, which was fashion in those days, and spent minutes at a time poking and prodding at the muzzle of the gun.
A mechanic brought a piece of soft iron baling wire, and some hockey tape.
“Give me the stick, Bernie.”
I tied the wire in a loop on the end of the stick and taped it for security.
Carefully, bending under and forward, I unlatched the gun, and with some beef to it, pulled the gun into the loading position, and pretended to switch magazines. Then I shoved the gun back into its level firing position. One could hear the little ‘click’ when the spring-loaded pin snapped into position. A wedge of metal on the carrier pushed it out of the way, and then it would snap in. The wedge acted as a safety catch. There was another pivoting pin, and an arm, and a cable to release it when the need to re-load arose.
On some Nieuports, as I recall, there was no rail, the gun just pivoted directly on a mount. A cable went to the front of the wing. You had a whole different system. Yet the basic ‘machines’ were simple, i.e. a wedge, (inclined plane,) or a pivot, (pulley,) etc, were common to both mounts. The Nieuport cable pulled on the end of a lever—another example of a simple machine. The lever mounted on a pivot and was bolted to the gun. The threads of a bolt—you guessed it, an inclined plane. There were common elements.
“Bear in mind that the slipstream would be a hundred miles per hour.” I noted for the men gathered to watch this interesting sight. “Adj, slip the loop over the end. Now wiggle it around in big circles.”
The SE mount...
With the end of the stick knocking and clunking, the gun wobbled back and forth a good two inches either way at the barrel tip.
I used another length of baling wire to hook on to the gun from a position behind the cockpit, and got a mechanic to yank on it intermittently.
Murphy’s Law states, ‘If something can go wrong, then sooner or later, it probably will.’
“Give it some fairly hefty tugs,” I suggested. “It kind of pulsates back and forth, around and around.” I explained. “It also goes back and forth a little, and up and down a little.”
We were just considering whether or not to raise the nose of the plane on some higher saw horses when suddenly the thing let go with a ‘clunk.’ The gun slid backwards along the track, upside down and hit with a wham. It rocked back and forth considerably.
“Holy shit.” Said the mechanic.
“The fuckin’ thing practically came off in my lap.” He added, as he was standing right there.
“What is amazing, is that it stayed on at all,” noted Bernie.
Stepping forward as one, the gun hung there, upside down and muzzle pointed at the dirt.
“The track isn’t bent at all. Well, a little kink, maybe.” Said Bernie, and we all saw it. “If it came back with much more force, it would have fallen right off. It looks like the carrier is spread.”
Under those kinds of forces the track was far too flexible. It whipped from side to side maybe two to three inches.
It turns out the little sliding carrier that bolted to the gun lug was a casting. Due to the initial batches being brittle and easily snapped, the manufacturer fiddled with the metallurgy and made it softer. That little casting, with its squared off ‘C’ shape, was all that held the gun in place on its ‘I’ beam track. The gun bolted through a lug in the casting.
“If the muzzle swung to one side, it might have just jammed in the track, and it would have been immovable.” Was my own conclusion. “On the Nieuport, it could have just twisted the mounting lug. If it wasn’t latched properly, this could happen when the plane was right-side up, as well.”
It would have had the same effect.
“We’d better write up a memo to all our guys on this one.” I told the Adj. “It would have been better to machine this from the solid.”
And we’re not sure which type Billy had, either.
“Yes, sir.” He said cheerfully.
“The missive to the Air Ministry will have to be very detailed and very specific.” He informed us. “And very diplomatic.”
“Make sure you describe our test, and suggest they try it out on the Nieuport.” Added Dawley, as Bernie nodded his approval.
“I can rely on you.” I agreed.
Why fight it? He was the best man for the job.
There you have it. The gun worked itself loose. It just sort of ratcheted its way, especially when the barrel was swinging from side to side, with the airstream pushing back. We figured a little wear on the wedge, a spring-pin a little worn, or a little weak, or not quite seated-in properly. Who knows? Perhaps a little burr inside the hole, working on that pin in a side-to-side motion. We had just proven something. And with Howard-Smythe and Bernie to write up the reports, I was pretty happy with the whole thing.
With my education no one ever believes a word I say, at least among, ‘Higher Authority.’
Billy and I were even. A cheap and effective, ‘thank-you.’
“Okay, boys, put her right side up again.” And we left it to Jaeckl and the others to return our plane to service.
“Why do you think McGill went upside down?” Asked Bernie.
One final aspect of our little mystery remained to be cleared up.
“This is where the all-important psychological aspect comes in.” I decided. “McGill probably just got a little disoriented, or better yet the plane was at a high angle of attack and it simply stalled. He can’t even account for it, or won’t admit that he could have made a mistake. He was already disoriented when it happened.”
The little Belgian nodded in comprehension.
“That’s even easier at night, if you think of Bishop’s case.” I added. “He was probably side-slipping, and it just wedged itself in the track. He must have given it a hell of a pull, and when it came off, fuck. I’ll bet he felt some real relief.”
It was only when the questions started, that he ran into trouble. If a cop asks you enough questions, sooner or later, there will be one you just can’t answer.
And then you’re just plain fucked.
“I’m convinced.” I told my brother officers, as we trudged along.
“The sky is a huge and empty place, encompassing vast liberties for the soul.” Bernie noted philosophically. “But only for the truly adept.”
You got that right, Buddy. Nice thing about Bernie, he makes a nice, highly-credible witness. Honestly, all I had to do was to keep yanking on it. It would have come off sooner or later—
***
Major Dawley did the maps...
Speaking of the adept, our next operation involving the sound-detectors went off fairly well. It’s hard to say if it had any real military value, or if it just proved a point.
On this one we used the terrain in a whole new way. The enemy lines were across a wide valley, at the bottom of which was a stream. Into that stream drained tributaries, each running in its own little valley. These eventually sloped up in snaky turns to the flat plains above. It was a ‘dissected till plain,’ or whatever. The side gullies were separated by long, knobby fingers of land. The tops of them were level with the surrounding countryside.
Bernie brought in a big flatbed lorry and ceremoniously presented us with a pair of Hanriot aircraft. We put a big crew on it, supervised personally by a man from the factory. We mounted 130-horsepower Clergets on them. These tiny planes would be good for short-range strafing missions of a pin-point nature.
A ‘surgical’ operation.
Captain Dawley’s map showed a stream coming in from the west-north-west, and then draining generally east, tending to the south-east. The opposing armies were encamped and dug-in on the high ground, looking at each other across this water barrier.
In some of the side valleys were ponds, swamp, spring-fed pools of water, and in the bottomland, a flat floodplain of dead, brown marsh grass, although a few shoots of green would be in there amongst the shell-holes by now.
All of this was easily swept by machine guns. No-man’s land was a morass.
The enemy sound-detectors were set up on the points of the fingers of land, maybe a mile and a half to two and half miles apart. There were strands and clumps of forest, where peasants once gathered firewood. The sound-detector crews had their own vehicles and tents, a nice little set-up. They looked very comfortable.
If a number of them could get a good ‘fix’ on our engine noises, especially when engaged in takeoffs or landings, they could find us pretty easily by triangulation off of a map. They would send every bomber, and every plane they could scrape up if that happened. A little creative thinking was in order.
“So two planes attack each target, at sunset.” And everyone at the briefing nodded.
“Two Hanriots, due to their small size, should be good for the first one on the north-west.” I allowed. “I’ll take one and Duzek, you’ve been plaguing me, you can fly the other one.”
Duzek was from Canada, and we flew together from time to time.
“We plan on attacking these four here, in Captain Dawley’s drawing.”
I passed it around.
“We’ll have top cover provided by six Camels from the Jocks, and six SE’s from the Angels.”
The boys in the tent looked on and listened with rapt attention.
“Essentially we have a pair of Jocks, they take on the second one, a pair of SE’s take on the third one, and the Shagbats get the last target. That way we all take a share in it. If we go in as a group, parallel to the lines, our Biff gunners, flying up front, can strafe the Hunnic hordes all the way along, and keep their heads down until we peel off in turns.”
“I won’t tell you your jobs, but I plan on going in fast, and low, and hard. Out of the setting sun, just when they think they should be packing up and going home for the day.”
The German machine gunners were used to targets that walked towards them at twelve paces to the minute, not traversing across their front at a hundred-something miles per hour.
“I’ll bet a hundred bucks they don’t lead their targets, us, by anywhere near enough to hit anything.” I confidently offered, but there were no takers.
The Biffs would strafe the trenches with their front guns going in, but they had to conserve ammo for the targets. An aircraft up close and personal can be a daunting thing. The lower and closer to their faces we could get, the better. Most of the infantry would have their noses in the dirt. Actually, it’s not a question of money. We were betting our lives on it.
“It is going to piss them off.” I concluded. “Cherry Bomb, take target number two, Excalibur, number three, Bronco Bill number four.”
They have those crazy names painted on their planes. And for one brief, split second of time, I had my doubts. Not about the mission, but about the whole damned war, the sheer ruddy childishness of it all. I pushed those thoughts aside.
“Anything else?” Asked Howard-Smythe.
“Six pounds of bacon, and about thirty-two eggs.” I muttered. “Have Cookie fire up about a half-hour from now.”
He nodded soberly.
“Is that enough for ten guys?”
No answer. Dead silence.
We made our approach at low level, sneaking down a small valley on our own side.
Then we made a hard turn to the right at very low altitude, perhaps thirty to fifty feet. The wingmen, who were on the left, had to take the high side. The leader determined the speed and ‘lowness.’
I tried something new, something I’d been thinking about for some time. A few of my pilots were taught to shoot by Billy over at Narborough. Not to take anything away from Billy, but some of his tactics were a little out of date.
I figured we should evolve continuously.
So, I tried a new thing. When I came to the hillside on the enemy side of the valley, sure I pulled up, but this time it was a very different technique. I came arcing in low, coming at the finger of land from the side, instead of head-on. I went rolling over in a sort of ‘axial-roll attack’ as I pulled up and over.
Honestly, it was no concern of mine if the winger, in this case Duzek, followed.
He knew the plan, so he could stay out of the way.
I fired inverted at the enemy, and when safely going down the other side of the hill, I rolled out and continued on towards the next hill. Only then did I speed out into the valley proper, and reverse the turn, to come at the target again. Those procedure turns come in handy. Ninety to the right and two-seventy to the left.
Hah. Duzek was doing it his way. Can’t say as I blame him, but he’ll at least divide the opposition. He was flying ‘Wild Thing,’ the other HD-1.
The theory as visualized, was that the big threat was from underneath. This way I could see the terrain, and it was easier to ‘pull’ the plane than to ‘push’ it. It made a tighter turn, closer to the ground, and I could see more, and I didn’t worry so much about the engine conking out.
I made three inverted-gunnery passes at the sound-detector, the tents, the latrines, and horse-drawn wagons. The Fritzies were all in their holes. It’s pretty easy. Just zoom straight at the wall of earth and grass and shrubs dead ahead of you, pull back, and roll with the ailerons, shove just a bit of down elevator into it, then fire the gun. Zoom past the isolated hilltop, plunge down the other side, rolling out and down and across the valley beyond. I whooshed through the air and did it again, then we turned for home. And now Duzek would go home, and he would tell two friends. They’ll tell two friends. No one can hold a candle to me when it comes to unusual attitudes. It pays to be able to shoot from any position, any range, any attitude. The reason I sent guys to Billy was because I didn’t have the facilities, or the time. Now they could figure that out for themselves.
The Germans would go home and tell two friends as well.
It went off pretty well, although we all took hits through the airframes.
Big Bill Arnold got shot through the wrist, and so he went to the hospital.
Ultimately we lost him from the group. A couple of other guys had various nicks and scratches, due to small arms fire. Fragments more than anything. The Doc pulled a funny-looking chuck of something out of Patrick’s leg, one of the Biff gunners.
In some strange twist, Patrick had just taken out life insurance, or so he kept telling us.
We figured the bullet shattered on something, then went on to do other harm. To make a long story short, we knocked them all out, made it home fine and dandy, and then we really confused the Boche by moving all our operations to our third field.
Like I said, it all seemed so childish sometimes. The army launched their abortive little counterattack, and we got a nice little thank-you note and stuff like that.
We might have saved a few lives here and there.
***
Some of the others were worried about me.
The pain was pretty bad. Since I obviously couldn’t hide it from people like Bernie, the Adj and the doctor, I had to be seen to rest once in a while. To kill time, I went for a walk down the laneway without even telling anyone. There was no guilt, no worries, I knew I had an hour or an hour and half, and those inevitable little crises that come up every day could be handled by any one of them. I had my walking stick.
It sure would be nice to talk to Jennifer once in a while.
***
It’s all in your point of view.
The front view of a plane is a very small object. It’s hard to see, and if it comes at you out of the sun, then you’ve had it. The rear view of a plane is the exact same size. But it’s even harder to see. The rear view of a plane is all oblique angles. It literally disappears sometimes. It can have a shine to it that may not be immediately apparent when viewed flat-on, and yet on an angle it reflects a mirror-like image of the sky, becoming even harder to see.
Much has been written about aerial combat in the Great War, but by far the most dangerous work we ever undertook was low level, pin-point ground attacks against specified, high-value targets.
They knew that sooner or later we would show up.
The best way to do that was to rip out a page from Nelson’s book and cross the ‘T.’
Not so much in the Jutland fashion as in the Trafalgar fashion. At Jutland, Jellicoe cut across the head of the Fritzie battle column, bringing broadsides to bear on the end of a line. His battleships could fire broadsides, against a target which could only shoot back with front turrets.
At Trafalgar, Nelson split the enemy line with similar effect, using broadsides against ships anchored in a long line-up. This left one or two French ships using their fore and aft guns, the only ones that would bear, against an entire British fleet firing the usual broadsides, from both sides of the ship at once. These ideas had some bearing on what we were doing. Nelson did the small ‘t’ as opposed to the big ‘T.’ This doubled his own effective firepower. I can’t recall if he used two columns, but the reader gets the idea.
What this meant for us, was to approach the enemy trench at right angles. This limited the all-important exposure time where enemy small arms were a factor, and a dangerous factor at that.
The Hanriot HD-1’s had a bit of a disadvantage.
They were only armed with a single .303 machine gun in the nose. However, this was usually enough to keep people’s heads down on the attack approach. We did a few S-turns on the way in, firing short bursts. But the real problem was that when leaving the scene, the best thing to do was just to continue in a more or less straight path. To present one’s tail to the enemy, and make the turnaround further back, behind enemy lines, where there would be fewer rifles fired at you. You didn’t want to be lingering through a lazy, low-level turn directly above a trench that you had only recently strafed.
The big challenge, was that it made the most sense to strafe a trench lengthwise.
We decided to put a piece of steel plate behind the pilot’s back, head, and a plate under the seat to protect, ‘the family jewels.’ We took off the original, stock Clergets and substituted more powerful engines. They were highly-stressed, and very experimental, but we used them on short-range missions with limited duration. We shipped them back to the factory after a ten-hour life. That was probably as safe as we could make it.
The steel was only three-sixteenths of an inch thick, but it did the job on a number of occasions. Most of the hits were on an angle. A straight-on shot would have punctured it, and small metal fragments did cause a number of injuries.
We would have liked to put more armor around the fuel tank, but we didn’t have the time, or the resources. It would have required total disassembly of the front end of the fuselage, with many problems of reassembly. About all we could do about that, was to fill it up with a third or a quarter of a tank, and, ‘don’t mess around in the combat area.’
We screwed a simple metal plate to the bottom of the fuselage to protect the fuel tank.
A plate on each side. That’s it.
Crossing the T.
For this type of work, a professional, disciplined pilot is key. We made a suggestion, to put some nitrogen gas from a bottle into the tank, and sent it off, but we never heard back. That would have helped with fires and such. The pressurization of fuel tanks would have been a good idea. Since our electric fuel pumps were working, the idea didn’t get too far. The electric pumps eliminated the need to constantly pump pressure into the tank.
Just one more of our unsung contributions. It’s not always about racking up a big score.
With our new, specialized, ‘weapons-system,’ pilot and wingman could go out, launch rockets, turn around and be back in half an hour. And they still had guns to defend themselves against enemy fighters. Them guys loved shooting up trenches now.
While it didn’t put a lot of hours into your log book, the number of missions tended to mount up. It was a lot more effective use of our time and ‘combat exposure,’ rather than just cruising around looking for trouble.
With his twinkling green eyes, the bizarre waxed tips of his twirling moustache, the noggin-shaped head and his constant harping about using our ‘little grey cells,’ in spite of all that, Bernie was a real asset. It was no problem to test the HD-1’s in a new role and write up a quickie report for them guys. Tom Hastings, a ‘Leftenant,’ as they say in England, (and when in Rome, do as the English do,) turned out to be pretty useful too. For one thing, we couldn’t spare any manpower to do Bernie’s legwork. They seemed to work as a team. Apparently they had saved each other’s lives at some point early in the war.
We didn’t have time to get too deeply into it.
***
Some things are not my fault, and there are some things I take full responsibility for.
Depression is an ugly thing. It’s very debilitating. It’s a kind of physical ailment. It can go on for days. Sometimes you make a joke, and laugh, and then someone pipes up with, ‘sounds like you’re feeling better,’ and then for some reason it all comes crashing down again.
Depression feels uncomfortably numb.
Getting up in the morning was a bit of a chore. It was like flogging a zombie from the bed, to the ‘bath,’ and then to dress. I seemed to be moving a little slower in my old age.
No one has a perfect life. I had that all figured out by age twenty.
“Someday you’ll look back on all this and laugh.” Said Howard-Smythe.
He had his mother’s eyes and his father’s hard outer shell, but sometimes he came across as an older brother. He was telling me to take a rest now and again.
“I understand how this is a compelling urge.” He said one day early in April. “Stick-to-it-ive-ness is a wonderful thing. But you can push too hard.”
I’ve learned to listen to guys like Howard-Smythe, even when they’re wrong. But in this particular case he was dead right.
“The Baron wants your head.” He added. “Like you said, it pays to advertise.”
“Now you know why I let the press put my name in that story.” I murmured.
“The vertical element, only not in air combat but in psychology?” He asked.
He and one or two others were really into the bull-session thing. It was a kind of recreation. With our jobs we really didn’t need to play squash. Physically demanding as the flying was, it was the mental disruption we craved. We had to disrupt the obsession from time to time.
It’s bad enough to be a potential trophy for von Richtofen, let alone to obsess all day long about getting him first.
I saw an article in a paper once, entitled, ‘Slav versus Teuton,’ and it outlined the racial basis for the war. That stuff is not well remembered.
World War One was the last ‘nice’ war, where there were crystal-clear moral issues.
We had to fight to save the world from Imperialism under the wrong color of flag.
Good and evil were easy to determine. And of course the winners get to re-write history endlessly until it meets the needs of their mythology.
And so, many years later, people had no qualms about it, and in a sense, in Canada, Remembrance Day is ‘sacred,’ and somehow, ‘holy.’
It’s an icon, and you don’t mess lightly with people’s icons.
It’s kind of socially-acceptable ancestor worship, but don’t tell anyone I said that. Tell them it’s your own idea. See how they react.
There are no accidents, only cause and effect. When something happens, it is due to a chain of events, with no single event being overly significant in itself. All of the murder, all of the frightfulness of the war, all the ‘schrecklekeit’ was no accident. The evil that men do lives on long after they have gone. That’s quite a legacy. Guys like Hindenburg, Von Bismarck and yes, a few people on our side, built that legacy. Klausewitz, von Metternich, you know them guys. Cecil Rhodes, Lord Kitchener, ‘Chinese’ Gordon.
Guys like that piss me off.
In the years past, it was their hopes, dreams, aspirations, fears, wants, and needs.
Their courage, cowardice, sense of duty, honor, vanity (and all is vanity,) and integrity. Greed is not a family value. Pigheadedness is not a policy. Bigotry, prejudice and hatred play a role in fucking up the world in any given era.
Look where it got us. Look who’s in charge now. If they had brains they would be dangerous. Keep that in mind.
Keep in mind that no fame, no fortune is worth losing oneself.
Pain is quickly forgotten, no matter how agonizing, no matter how excruciating, the memory fades. That is merciful, or that is a ‘survival mechanism,’ whichever you prefer. Constant pain, as in a back injury, can be pretty demoralizing.
It’s all just a ‘narrenschiff,’ a ship of fools.
Some will be offended by this attitude, but I really ain’t prejudiced. I try to offend equally.
“All is vanity, and a striving after wind.”
That’s how it feels some days.
“And hoorah for the next man to die.” As the song goes.
(Tucker was obviously drunk when he wrote this. – ed.)
END
It ain't over yet, ladies and gentlemen.
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