XV. XV JACK SCOTT A VERY large group of devoted friends will learn with deep sense of personal bereavement of the untimely death of the young officer who, since his Oxford days, has been universally known as Jack Scott. A fortnight ago he took the first holiday which he had allowed himself for fifteen months. He went with a number of friends to St. Moritz. Until the end of his visit he appeared to be in all his usual robust strength. A day or two before he left, he was seized with a cold of an ordinary kind causing no anxiety. He stayed on the way home for a day or two in Paris, where the cold developed with a slight but not serious bronchial menace. A little unwisely, but taking a risk which many strong men have often taken without untoward consequence, he decided to cross to England. His condition on the voyage became worse. On his arrival, the case was diagnosed as one of double pneumonia, and in four days he was dead. The name of this distinguished officer was almost, if not quite, unknown to the general public, and yet there was in the British Army no more arresting and remarkable figure. I first met him fifteen years ago, when he was an undergraduate at Merton College and Master of the University Draghounds. I never saw any one, in my long experience of the hunting field, ride with a resolution and fearlessness so complete. He stamped himself even then upon my mind as one who had no conception whatever of the meaning or pressure of fear. Acquaintance ripened rapidly into friendship, and fuller knowledge of his practice in the hunting field confirmed my clear conviction that he was the bravest man I ever saw riding to hounds. He intended to go to the Bar, and in due course became a pupil in my chambers. He showed great industry and ability without any special promise of that undefinable combination of qualities which is the soil of great forensic His career and his greatness were to lie in a very different field. success. In August 1914 he was a junior officer in the Sussex Yeomanry, consumed, as many young officers at that moment detained in England were, with a burning desire to undertake active service at the earliest moment. He had never in his life been in an aeroplane; he was over thirty years old; but the air, and the prospect of air fighting, made an irresistible appeal to his adventurous nature. Quite early in the War he joined the R.A.F., and thereafter commenced an Odyssey of hazard, adventure, and terrible accidents which can hardly have been exceeded in the annals of the air. On one occasion before he went to France his machine collapsed when he XV. XV. was 2000 feet in the air. During the terrible fall that followed he was working and trying and testing, and when some 60 feet from the ground he regained a degree of control which saved his life but left him permanently a cripple. He lay for many months in hospital, during which the doctors could give no assurance that he would ever leave his bed. An immensely strong constitution asserted itself, and he was later found working on crutches at the R.A.F. staff at De Keyser's Hotel. 66 As soon as he became strong enough to walk unaided, he began again to strain every influence he possessed to obtain leave to go on active service in France. To fight in an aeroplane, he said, "is the one thing a lame man can do as well as another." His own doctor told me that he was quite unfit to go, and without daring to inform Jack Scott of what I was doing, I went to General Henderson and placed the medical report before him. For the moment I succeeded, but a month later he came round to our house, the embodiment of gaiety, and told us he was under orders to proceed to France in the following week as a Flight Commander. Two and a half months later he was appointed to the command of the 60th Squadron. It is not an exaggeration to say that in a service manned by heroes he was universally admitted within three months to be one of the most brilliant and daring. He carried, indeed, to the combats of the air the chivalry of Athos and the Gascon audacity of d'Artagnan. Major Bishop, V.C., was under his command in the squadron, and he himself told me at a later period that for cool and unshakable courage he never in his experience met Scott's equal. Readers of Bishop's book will remember the part played by the "Major" in one of its most thrilling episodes. The " Major was Jack Scott. He had escape after escape, and those who knew him began to say that he bore a charmed life. And he continued to fight in the air, commanding the 60th Squadron, which became known as the V.C. Squadron, and habitually violating the rule which, in that stage of the struggle, forbade the commanding officers of squadrons to engage personally in air combat. When positively forbidden to engage, he positively refused to obey, saying, "I will not send boys to fight unless I go with them. Lower my rank if you like, and then I can fight." He met with accident after accident, until hardly a part of his body was quite unscathed, but it seemed as if no risk, or combination of risks, could destroy so tenacious a life or daunt a spirit so buoyant. Two hours before the Armistice according to arrangement became effective Scott was flying, not knowing how long he might have the chance of doing so, over the German lines. His eye was as keen as that of a hawk, and he discerned far away congested in and about a road a German infantry battalion. It was entirely at his mercy. He was fully equipped with bombs of the most destructive and disruptive kind. No officer in the Flying Force was better able than himself to push the full aggressive from the air. By all the laws of war he was entitled to do so. Perhaps by all the laws of war it was his duty to do XV. XV. so for the Armistice had not in fact been ratified and might never have been ratified at all. I express no opinion as to where the rule of military duty pointed. But this officer who had ruthlessly and incessantly destroyed German lines while the contest raged, believing in his own heart that the Armistice would certainly be ratified, could not and did not achieve the butchery which was in his power. I suspect that he chose the nobler part in flying back re infecta to the British lines. He was promoted from the 60th Squadron to the command of the XIth Wing, and there, too, though a Lieutenant-Colonel, he insisted on flying over the line in defiance of orders. It was notorious in the service that this glorious disobedience alone excluded him from the highest decorations. His subordinates obtained them on his recommendation. He was next appointed to the important post of Commandant of the Central Flying School at Upavon, which he gave up only to return to France to command another Wing. In 1920 he wrote the history of his old squadron in soldierly and unpretentious fashion, but not without considerable literary skill. When the War ended, he was offered a permanent commission in the Air Force, which had learnt to recognise that he was not only a dashing fighter, but that he possessed in addition unusual qualities of mind and of organising capacity. Shortly afterwards, he was appointed Air Secretary to Mr. Winston Churchill, who was at that time Secretary of State both for the War Office and for the Air Force. He retained this position |