The Airman’s Rendezvous

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Star-Bulletin Staff

And I, in the wide fields of air Must keep with him my rendezvous. It may be I shall meet him there When clouds, like sheep, drift slowly through The pathless meadows of the sky And their cool shadows move beneath ... Some summer noon of white and blue.

Oh, he must seek me far and wide
And track me at his fleetest pace,
For there are lonely depths in space --
Solitudes where I may hide,
Laughing at him when he has gone
On a false scent, with laboring breath ...
But I've a rendezvous with Death
Over Verdun, as night comes on.
Perhaps some autumn afternoon
Of cloudless skies, far in the blue
Beneath a ghostly waning moon,
I shall be flying without care
Or thought of war, or thought of death;
Unwarned that he is coming, too,
Swiftly through the upper air
Straight to his well-planned rendezvous.
Until I hear, with darkening brain:
"Well met! We shall not meet again."

Capt. James Norman Hall
Wing Commander, 94th Aero Squadron, 1918

HERB Kane, whose meditations on the intermingled crafts of historical research and artistic interpretation are featured on page D1 of today's Star-Bulletin, recently moved into the realm of aviation art when he began a series of paintings for the James Norman Hall museum in Tahiti.

Hall, an aviator of the Great War, was perhaps best-known as one of the authors of "Mutiny on the Bounty." When he got the assignment, the Hawaiian artist recalled a poem written by Hall that "greatly moved me when I read it as a teenager," said Kane. "I never expected to meet his family or be able to celebrate him in paintings." Here, Hall's first aerial victory high over the Western Front shows his SPAD VII of the Lafayette Escadrille shooting down a German Albatros fighter.

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