Can you see anything god-like in the face of WWI Canadian air ace Billy Bishop VC? One hundred years ago this week Sydney's purple-prosed Globe and Sunday Times War Pictorial compared our sides' aviators, the Eyes of the War, to gods, and to Moses.
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"The swift, noiseless rush of a slender impalpable winged body over the ground, a sudden imponderable lifting in the air, and she's up and away – the latest thing in military bi-planes.
"The men themselves, well they may be merely plain Brown and Jones, but they are more than men. They are of this world and above it.
"For today's hostile army there is an end to secrecy. A general cannot escape those calm eyes whose owners ride upon the Heavens as on a horse at speeds of up to 90 miles an hour. There is always that growing, sinister, crackle of the exhaust, that mocking speck in the sky.
"Our aviators have conquered fear. The Eyes of the War look death in the face from the outset. When Moses came down from Mount Sinai, bearing the tablets of stone on which were the Ten Commandments, no man could look on his face because of the glory of it ... And so, in a measure, no ordinary being can look on these Service pilots. You are looking at someone who is a little more than human, because he has travelled in spirit beyond the fear of death. These pilots have about them something remote, inexplicable, passing the ordinary understanding."
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