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In Detroit, two fliers arose from sickbeds to join in the rescue: Floyd Bennett and Bernt Balchen. At 5 o'clock of a morning they set out in a giant Ford trimotored liner. At Lake Ste. Agnes, Bennett had a fever of 102, could go no further. He was rushed to Quebec, deathly ill of pneumonia. Commander Richard Byrd came to his side; Col. Charles A. Lindbergh made an inspired flight to bring him succor (see MEDICINE, p. 22). Canada suddenly contained a noble percentage of the world's greatest fliers, for by now Clarence D. Chamberlin had joined the arctic air circus.
Bennett died. Threatened by fate a year ago, when he was hurt testing the ship in which Byrd flew across the Atlantic, he was finally struck down. He who had survived the terrors of a flight over the North Pole in 1926, succumbed at the prime of his flying career, at 38. He who was to go with Byrd to the Antarctic this year died in Jeffrey Hale Hospital, Quebec, despite all that science and medicine could do.
His body was taken to Washington, there to be buried beside that of another explorer in cold places, Rear Admiral Robert Edwin Peary. A Negro was sent out to dig the grave in Arlington National Cemetery; he related that while he was making this dusty place for a flyer to stay in, a tall man had come quietly to his side and watched him at his work. The Negro asked his name but the man, as mysterious as a spirit, said merely "I was his friend." The stranger borrowed the Negro's spade and stood with his feet planted in the hole, lifting out the earth. For a moment he leaned back on his shovel; "So this is the end. . . ." he said. Then he stepped out of the grave and went away. In the silence, under a grey sky, the Negro went on digging.
Sadness, like fame, is fleeting. When the trans-Atlantic heroes reached Manhattan a city went mad with welcome. . . . Once again the wires hummed with consequences.
* Meticulous editors, discovering German, announced in the Manhattan newspapers that the trans-Atlantic plane's name should be pronounced as though it were spelled "Bray-men."