Air Men o' War. Cable Boyd
brought out with mechanics hanging to the wing-tips to steady her against the gusts, the engine started and given a trial run up; then the pilot eased her off, looked round, felt his controls, ran the engine up again until his machine was throbbing and quivering to the pull of the whirling propeller, and waved the signal to haul away the chocks that blocked his wheels. His machine began at once to taxi up into the wind, still swaying and swinging dangerously, and then, in answer to the pilot's touch, lifted clear of the ground, ducked a second, rose again and swooped upward. The watching crowd let go a breath of relief as she rose clear, but before the breath was out it changed to a gasp of horror as the machine, caught by some current or eddy of wind, swerved, heeled, righted under the desperate effort of the pilot, slipped sideways, and with a sudden swoop plunged and crashed on the ground. The machine was hopelessly smashed and the pilot was dead when they ran and came to him and picked him up.
The Squadron Commander would have abandoned or postponed the attempt to get a machine up, but the pilot of "Silver Wings" spoke to him and urged that he be allowed to have a try. "I'm sure I can get her off," he said. "I'll take her right over to the far side of the ground clear of the currents round the sheds. I know what she can do, and I'm certain I can make it."
So the Major gave a reluctant consent, and they all watched breathlessly again while "Silver Wings" fought her way along the ground against the wind, lifted suddenly, drove level for a hundred feet, swooped sickeningly again until her wheels were a bare six feet off the ground, hoicked up and away. Everyone could see by her dips and dives and sudden heelings and quick righting how bumpy and gusty the air was, and it was not until she was up several hundred feet, and came curving round with the wet light shining on her silvery planes that the watchers on the ground heaved a sigh of relief, watched her streak off down wind, and swing in a climbing turn that lifted her farther and farther into the safety of height.
"He's all right now," said one. "Only, the Lord help him when he comes to land again." The hum of the engine droned down to them, and the shining wings wheeled again close up against the dark background of the low clouds and shot swiftly down wind towards the lines.
Over the lines she turned again and began to fight her way across wind and moving slowly north. The wind constantly forced her drifting over Hunland, and in accordance with his orders to hold close along the front, the pilot had to keep making turns that brought him facing back to the west and fighting slowly up wind, edging off a little and slanting north and watching the landscape slide off sideways under him. And so, tacking and manœuvring buffeted and wind-blown, he edged his way along the front, his eyes alternately on the instrument-board and on the ground and puffing shell smoke beneath, his ears filled with the roar of his engine and the shriek and boom of the wind beating about him, his hands and feet in constant motion, juggling with controls, feeling, balancing, handling the throbbing horse-power and the wind-tossed fabric under him. And so at last, at the end of a hard-fought hour, he came to the spot he sought, circled and "sat over it" for five minutes, and watched and tried to pick up the details of the struggle that spluttered and spat in smoke-puffs and flashing jets of fire and leaping spouts of earth and smoke beneath him. He began to piece together the meaning of what he could see, and of what he had been told before he set out. A body of our infantry in the attack had gone too far, or their supports had not come far enough, with the result that they had been cut off and surrounded and were fighting desperately to hold off the infantry attacks that pressed in on them under a heavy supporting artillery fire. The cut-off party were hidden from the view of our front line by a slight ridge and a wrecked and splintered wood, and their desperate straits, the actual fact of their still being in existence, much less their exact location, was unknown to our side. This much the pilot knew or was able to figure out; what he could not know was the surge of hope, the throb of thankfulness that came to the hard-pressed handful below him as they saw the glancing light flash from his hovering "Silver Wings." They made signals to him, waving a dirty flag and straining their eyes up for any sign that he saw and understood. And with something very near to despair in their hearts they saw the shining wings slant and drive slowly up into the wind and draw away from over their heads.
"No good, Jones," said a smoke and dirt-grimed young officer to the man still waving the flag. "He doesn't see us, I'm afraid. Better put that down and go back and help hold off those bombers."
"Surely he'd hear all this firing, sir," said the man, reluctantly ceasing to wave.
"I think his engine and the wind drowns any noise down here," said the officer. "And if he hears anything, there's plenty of heavy gunfire all along the front going up to him."
"But wouldn't he see the shells falling amongst us, sir, and the bombs bursting, and so on?" said the man.
"Yes; but he is seeing thousands of shells and bombs along the line from up there," said the officer; "and I suppose he wouldn't know this wasn't just a bit of the ordinary front."
Another man crawled over the broken débris of the trench to where they stood. "Mister Waller has been hit, sir," he said; "an' he said to tell you it looks like they was musterin' for another rush over where he is."
"Badly hit?" said the officer anxiously. "All right, I'll come along."
"He sees us, sir," said the man with the flag, in sudden excitement. "Look, he's fired a light."
"Pity we haven't one to fire," said the officer. "But that might be a signal to anyone rather than to us."
He turned to crawl after the man who had brought the message, and at the same moment a rising rattle of rifle-fire and the quick following detonations of bursting bombs gave notice of a fresh attack being begun. Still worse, he heard the unmistakable tat-tat-tat of renewed machine-gun fire, and a stream of bullets began to pour in on them from a group of shell-holes to their right flank, less than a hundred yards from the broken trench they held. Under cover of this pelting fire, that forced the defenders to keep their heads down and cost them half a dozen quick casualties amongst those who tried to answer it, the German bombers crept closer in from shell-hole to shell-hole, and their grenades came over in faster and thicker showers. The little circle of ground held by the group belched spurts of smoke, hummed to the passage of bullets, crackled and snapped under their impact, quivered every now and then to the crash and burst of shells. They had been fighting since the night before; they were already running short of ammunition, would have been completely short of bombs but for the fact of the ground they had taken having held a concreted dug-out with plentiful stores of German bombs and grenades which they used to help out their own supply. The attack pressed savagely; it began to look as if it would be merely a matter of minutes before the Germans rushed the broken trenches they held, and then, as they knew, they must be overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers. Waller, the wounded officer, had refused to be moved. "I'll stay here and see it out," he said; "I don't suppose that will be long now;" and the other, the young lieutenant who was the only officer left on his feet by this time, could say no more than a hopeful "Maybe we'll stand 'em off a bit yet," and leave him there to push along the trench to where the fire and bombing were heaviest and where the rush threatened to break in.
The din was deafening, a confused uproar of rifles and machine-guns cracking and rattling out in front and banging noisily in their own trench, of bombs and grenades crashing sharply on the open or booming heavily in the trench bottom, of shells whooping and shrieking overhead or crumping savagely on the ground, and, as a background of noise to all the other noises, the long rolling, unbroken thunder of the guns on both sides far up and down the lines.
But above all the other din the lieutenant caught a new sound, a singing, whirring boo-oo-oom that rose to a deep-throated roar with a sharp staccato rap-tap-tap-tap running through it. He looked up towards the sound and saw, so close that he half ducked his head, a plunging shape, a flashing streak of silver light that swept over his head and dived straight at the ground beyond his trench, with stabbing jets of orange flame spitting out ahead of it. A bare fifty feet off the ground where the Germans crouched in their shell-holes "Silver Wings" swooped up sharply, curved over, dived again with the flashes of her gun flickering and streaming, and the bullets hailing down on the heads of the attackers. It was more than the Germans, lying open and exposed to the overhead attack, could bear. They scrambled from their holes, floundered and ran crouching back for the