"The Calming Dusk", painted by Simon Cattlin
When discussing memoirs of World War I pilots, Sagittarius Rising is a title that invariably comes up, sharing space in the pantheon with works such as No Parachute and Der Rote Kampfflieger. Unlike Der Rote Kampfflieger, however, Sagittarius Rising is undoubtedly the work of the attributed author, Cecil Lewis.
The book is not so much a timeline of events as it is a patchwork of memories reflected upon decades later. Literature critic Samuel Hynes writes in the preface to the second edition: "Two Cecil Lewises inhabit Sagittarius Rising. One is the seventeen-year-old who talks his way into the Royal Flying Corps, learns to fly and fights in the war, and returns at the war's end to the uncertainties of peace. The other is that boy twenty years later, the man who remembers the boy's war, and writes down the stories that memory tells him, and reflects on what those stories mean." (Lewis xiii)
This, of course, begs the question of accuracy. Lewis himself seems to anticipate the question: "Back and across the years! It is not easy. I kept no diaries, and memory, that imperfect vista of recorded thought, eludes and deceives." (Lewis 3) Nevertheless, it would be wrong to dismiss the book as unreliable. Lewis continues, "Still I can convey something after all. Not a connected narrative of adventure and heroism; rather, in a series of incidents and impressions, all that my mind remembers of the shape of those six years. Some of it perhaps will be inaccurate in detail, but broadly it is true." (Lewis 3)
As the chapters file by, these words prove to be quite true. While the book is not a peer-reviewed research work, Lewis' recollection of specific instances remains particularly lucid. He chooses to include the details he is more or less sure about, and is content to let the rest be. Moreover, his patchwork style of narrative gives readers a unique look into the inner workings of a veteran pilot's mind without losing readers in the day-to-day details.
The Sky, Our Battlefield
Lewis' experience in combat was typical for an RFC airman during the Great War. Following RFC Commander Hugh Trenchard's policy of taking the fight aggressively to the enemy, Lewis often found himself flying into enemy territory. Usually, the Germans had a favorable position on him, both in height and in fighting over their own lines. His only advantages were the sheer amount of numbers the Allied forces could field alongside him and the superior speed of his aircraft (when he was flying the Se5a). Other than that, he had to make his own luck.
Of course, all of this was good to be aware of in theory. But as soon as battle was joined, theoretical knowledge took the backseat. In a frenzied dogfight, emotions and goals were momentarily distilled to their rawest and most simple form: "We were trained with one object - to kill. We had one hope - to live." (Lewis 2) Beyond those basic, animalistic emotions, there was no more room in a pilot's head for any other feeling. Any additional emotions, in Lewis' experience, would take away critical mental bandwidth from the main goal of surviving: "...such fighting demanded iron nerves, lightening reactions, snap decisions, a cool head, and eyes like a bluebottle, for it all took place at high speed and was three dimensional. ...So, like duelling, air fighting required a set steely courage, drained of all emotion, fined down to a tense and deadly effort of will. The Angel of Death is less callous, aloof, and implacable than a fighting pilot when he dives." (Lewis 126)
Often in public imagination, the Ace pilot of World War I is akin to the barnstormer of the 1920s, full of reckless abandon and willing to try any outlandish stunt in his magic carpet of a plane. In Lewis' mind, this persona was more the exception than the rule: "With the exception of Ball, most crack fighters did not get their Huns in dog-fights. They preferred safer means. They would spend hours synchronizing their guns and telescopic sights so that they could do accurate shooting at, say, two or three hundred yards. ...[this sort of fighter pilot] would not hurry after his quarry, but keep a wary eye to see he was not about to be attacked himself. He would gradually draw nearer, always in the blind spot, sight his guns very carefully, and then one long deadly burst would do the trick." (Lewis 127-128)
Lewis' observations paint a more realistic portrait of the successful pilot's psyche than what the tabloids were happy to feed the public (both before and after the war). As he matured, he adopted this attitude of wariness in his own air fighting. Even so, he had numerous close scrapes, including a bullet grazing his back that would have killed him had he not been bent over in the cockpit at the moment.
Despite his caution, Lewis knew that other veteran pilots with as much discretion died every day. The war was just too vast, too all-encompassing. It invariably swallowed all; it would get you eventually. Yet somehow, Lewis managed to survive. The mental stress of aerial combat certainly took its toll on him. Nonetheless, he never became so jaded that the skies lost their wonder to him: "The air was our element, the sky our battlefield. The majesty of the heavens, while it dwarfed us, gave us, I think, a spirit unknown to sturdier men who fought on earth. Nobility surrounded us. We moved like spirits in an airy loom, where wind and cloud and light wove day and night long the endless fabric of the changing sky." (Lewis 69 -70)
The Gadget King
In his diverse career, Lewis had ample opportunities to encounter a plethora of interesting characters. Chief among these would be the lovable oddball, Bodie "the Gadget King". Without preamble, Lewis introduces us to him in the middle of page 85: "Bodie was the Gadget King. He couldn't leave his machine alone. The carpenters and riggers were always making him something - a rack for his Very lights; a box for sandwiches; a special gun-mounting; extra cases for spare drums; a new sort of wind screen; special seat cushions, and so on." (Lewis)
Bodie's imagination knew no limits. When he wasn't contemplating ways to make his life easier in the cockpit, he was scheming up new ways to take the war to the Kaiser. His machinations were innovative, rivaling anything contrived by a mad scientist. Whether or not they were practical? Well... that was another thing entirely: "At one period of the Somme offensive he used to go up solo because he had equipped his machine with so many Lewis guns that it was incapable of lifting a passenger as well. [He had guns pointing front, behind, and below.] ...None of these guns had any sights, and indeed it would have been almost impossible to hit anything with them. But evidently Bodie, in some strange nightmare, had seen himself surrounded by enemy aircraft, and imagined that by pulling the plug of all three guns at once he might manage to 'brown' half a dozen. The gun craze lasted about a week, and then the Squadron Commander gently but firmly told Bodie that his aeroplane was not a Christmas tree and that he really must get down to work!" (Lewis 85-86)
Bodie's crowning achievement, though, nearly proved to be his last. After hearing a Sergeant complain about how unreliable rifle grenades were, Bodie's ears pricked up. "This was an opportunity after Bodie's own heart. He swapped a pair of flying-gloves ...for the case of rifle grenades and had it brought down to the hangar, where its explosive possibilities made it much respected by all the air mechanics! Not so by Bodie. A case of bombs which could be induced to go off had the sort of lure a mouse-trap must have to one of those experienced mice who know how it works!" (Lewis 86)
Working with his less-than-enthusiastic accomplices, Bodie rigged a contraption to his plane to simultaneously pull the pin on ten grenades and drop them. Characteristically, his plan was simply to "bloody well drop them on the first thing he saw." In his mind, it was the perfect attack, because "they will never expect me to drop anything on them." (Lewis 87) If he was ever right about one thing, it would be that. Bodie was the sort of disaster no-one could see coming... even his own allies.
Having sweet-talked a gullible observer to join him in this endeavor, Bodie proceeded to nearly end the expedition before it began by catching his foot in the grenades as he clambered into the cockpit. "Bodie remained suspended, with one leg in the air, like an ecstatic puppy at his first lamp post, saying in a rather quavering voice, 'It's all right, it's all right!' ...When three seconds had elapsed and the aeroplane had not turned into a sort of Brock's benefit, [the mechanics] swung the engine and were heartily glad to see the machine disappear 'this side up with care' in the distance." (Lewis 87-88)
With Bodie gone, the aerodrome was a quieter place. Needless to say, the tranquility was short-lived: "At last, in the distance, a machine was seen staggering in a sort of drunken roll towards the aerodrome. ...it was Bodie, returning from his gallant attempt to Win the War." (Lewis 88) The plane was a shambles. Fabric had been blasted away; struts and wires snapped; controls only barely serviceable; and, adding insult to injury, the remains of the observer's wireless set had been embedded in the poor fellow's posterior. The observer wryly summed up what everyone already knew: "'One of those bloody bombs,' he said, cautiously rubbing his backside, 'went off.'" (Lewis 88)
This episode was merely par for the course for Bodie. Many pilots took every precaution to preserve themselves. Bodie flat out dared the worst to happen over and over again.
Notably, Lewis had run-ins with more notable figures, such as Albert Ball, Arthur Rhys Davis, and Georges Guynemer. Each of these larger-than-life characters makes a brief appearance in Lewis' memory. But it could be argued that it was the irrepressible Bodie that left the largest stamp on Lewis. After all, much ink had been spilled on the former Aces, but it fell to Lewis alone to perpetuate the memory of Bodie.
A Paradise For the Enthusiastic Pilot
Another unique facet of Lewis' experience was that the sheer amount of aircraft he flew during his career. While most Great War pilots flew a handful of different types, Lewis logged over 1,000 flight hours in 53 different types of machines. Yet even with all of his accumulated flight
experience, Lewis was hard-pressed to decisively pick a favorite mount. Early in the book, he writes of the Morane-Saulnier L "Parasol", "It was certainly not love at first sight, nor even at second or third sight; but I did come to love the Morane as I loved no other aeroplane." (Lewis 37) Later on, he declares that for "actual flying" his favorite aircraft was the Sopwith Triplane, with the Camel being a close runner-up. (Lewis 149) He also had a soft spot for the Se5a, writing, "The machine (for 1917) was quite fast. ...It could be looped and rolled and dived vertically without breaking up. Altogether, it was a first-class fighting-scout (probably the most successful designed during the war), and was relied upon to re-establish the Allied air supremacy lost during the winter. (Lewis 121)
Given his effervescent love for aircraft, it would seem that fate smiled on Lewis when he was taken off the front lines for Home Defense. Instead of posting him to a backwater training group, Lewis was thrilled to find that he had been posted to an aircraft testing squadron. "It was, of course, a paradise for the enthusiastic pilot to whom flying itself was a continual delight. I was avid of all air experience; the way each different machine answered the controls, took off, turned, stunted, glided, landed, all this never ceased to fascinate. ...It was grand to fly a well-thought-out machine, infuriating to test one where some important control or indicator had been inefficiently placed." (Lewis 117)
To some extent, the machines were all his children. Some of these problem children irritated him to no end while others he had an easy relationship with. But the bliss of taking flight in every one of them (even the ill-tempered ones) was not lost on him. In his own way, he loved them all.
This made him a perfect test pilot, and later, the perfect candidate to go to China after the war and train fledgling pilots there.
Chance or Fate
It is not unusual for Great War pilots to have an introspective bent. Living through the greatest conflict known to man at the time has the tendency to make most survivors consider their own mortality. But Lewis goes above and beyond the usual existential musings found in most pilots' memoirs. His philosophical ruminations form the connecting ligaments between the patchwork of tales.
"Eight months overseas, four months of the Somme battle, three hundred and fifty hours in the air, and still alive! Pilots, in 1916, were lasting, on an average, for three weeks. To-day it seems incredible that I came through; but at that time I did not calculate the odds, for, as I have said, I had an absolute and unshakable belief in my invulnerability. I can give no reason for this. It was quite groundless; but then all faith is groundless. It is a divine example of the illogicality of the human soul, backing itself with arrogant humility against the laws of Chance or Fate. When it triumphs we affirm that the hand of God was upon us, when it fails it has at least sustained us; and others who continue to believe dismiss its failure, saying those it abandoned did not possess it in sufficient measure." (Lewis 113-114)
Some pilots found solace in God's providence over all, such as Hans Schröder. Looking back, Lewis finds no comfort in it. While he was in the RFC, he was cut from the same cloth as his peers. Together they all assumed their own invincibility, perhaps even assuming in the deepest recesses of their minds that the hand of God was upon them. But the Somme quickly challenged this naïvety.
In Lewis' mind, if there was a God, a row of coffins denoted the list of those whom that God had failed. Intriguingly enough, Lewis has more in common with Christianity that he realizes. His confusion echoes that of the Psalmist in Psalm 44: "Yet for your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered. ... Why do you hide your face
and forget our misery and oppression?" (Psalm 44 ESV) In his post-war reflections, Lewis is mature enough to realize that blind, uninformed faith that shies away from the hard-hitting questions is at best naïve, and at worst, dangerous.
The question, then, is where to go from there. Where the Psalmist and pilots such as Schröder find meaning in a God who reigns over all and a coming kingdom "not of this world" (Schröder 158), Lewis directs his faith in a different direction...
A New Creed
In one sense, Lewis possesses tremendous foresight. Already, writing prior to World War Two, he can see scenarios where "My breed, the pilots, whose war has been more chivalrous and clean handed than any other, will be ordered to do violence to the civilian population. ...We shall kill the women and children. Of course, the thing is insane; but then if the world submits to the rule of homicidal maniacs, it deserves to be destroyed." (Lewis 90) He also successfully predicts the rise of UAVs: "An army could stop an army, a fleet a fleet; but a thousand aeroplanes could not stop a thousand enemy aeroplanes. Wire netting would not keep flies out. Both would get through to their objectives. ...And they would not even have the satisfaction of seeing their own men avenge the raiders by taking at least the life of the enemy pilot, for there need be no men in those machines, they can be controlled by wireless: their destruction will mean nothing: they will go on coming day and night." (Lewis 138)
Lewis isn't kidding himself; he can clearly see the future, and it looks bleak. To avert this, he proposes that "the rational solution, as yet unsupported by the emotional drive which would make it a common faith, a cardinal necessary not to be denied... is clear and simple: World state, world currency, world language. It will demand new disciplines, new allegiances, new ideals. Probably two or three more world wars will be necessary to break down the innate hostility to such changes; but that is the way it must go." (Lewis 91)
This may indeed be the way the future goes eventually. But, it could only hold together if the one-world government was possessed of an inherent goodness, "incorruptible, free from bias and self-interest, and devoted to law and order as our civil police are to-day. There is no other way." (Lewis 138)
However, there is a discernable shift in tone between the Lewis who writes the main body of his book in 1936 and the Lewis who revisits his work in 1963. In his preface to the second edition of Sagittarius Rising, Lewis writes with a heavy heart, "The changes men have seen in this half century can hardly be believed. ...there is a new Creed which begins: 'I believe in atomic fission, breaker of Heaven and Earth...'!" (Lewis xvii)
It would have come as no surprise to Lewis for Hitler to have He-111s savage London during the Blitz or for Mussolini to use poison gas bombs against the Ethiopians in 1935. Obviously, these two men were prime examples of the "homicidal maniacs" to which he referred. But one cannot help but wonder if Lewis would stick by his original, hopeful idea of a just one-world government when the best and the brightest of the world were the ones firebombing Dresden and vaporizing Hiroshima. It almost seems as if, decades later, Lewis is more leery of embracing the innate goodness of mankind.
Conclusion
Sagittarius Rising is a literary masterwork. Where many memoirs read woodenly, plodding along from event to event, Lewis flits from memory to memory with engaging ease. A supreme narrator, Lewis writes in a conversational tone, pausing on specific events just long enough to satisfy curiosity without letting the thing drag on. Along the way, he is unafraid to wade into deep introspective waters.
By its very nature, Sagittarius Rising is not a document to pull hard data from. Rather, it is more of a philosophical work, with episodes of recollection thrown in. As such, it is incredibly useful if you want to immerse yourself in the era and get a look inside pilots' heads to understand their psychology. Lewis does not refrain from sharing the workings of his mind, and appears to largely dodge the politically-convenient editing other notable memoirs underwent.
Ultimately, Sagittarius Rising is a love letter. In part, it is a memorial to the pilots Lewis flew with: "...we very young men had no place, actual or prospective, in a peaceful world. We walked off the playing fields into the lines. We lived supremely in the moment. Our preoccupation was the next patrol, our horizon the next leave." (Lewis 1)
But more than this, it is a love letter to the pure joy of flying. As Lewis writes, it is unmistakable that he longs for a simpler time: "Reliability is on the Altar and Risk is in the Crypt. ...what transport aircraft Captain today, hedged around with his safety gadgets and ground controls, does not long to send them all to the Devil, to vault into a cockpit, flip a switch and take off bareheaded into the wind? Perhaps not, perhaps the breed has changed; but I know which I would choose." (Lewis xvii - xviii)
In spite of all Lewis' combat experience, he still retains a sense of boyish wonder. Perhaps there's a bit of Bodie in Lewis; a dreamer in him that just wants to cast himself back into the sky with enthusiastic, reckless abandon. More than anything else, it is this infectious sense of sheer passion that defines Sagittarius Rising. Nearly one hundred years after its first publication in 1936, it still successfully conveys that daring "spirit unknown to sturdier men who fought on earth" (Lewis 69) and brings the wonder of it to a new generation.
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References:
Lewis, Cecil. Sagittarius Rising. Penguin Group, 2014.
Schröder, Hans. A German Airman Remembers. Greenhill Books and Aeolus Publishing, 1986.