Winged Warfare Read Online Free PDF Page B

the way toward our own lines and glided as far as I could without any help from the engine.
    I saw beneath me a destroyed village and my heart sank. I must be behind the German lines. Was my real flying career, just begun, to be ended so soon? Was I to suffer the fate the flying man most abhors—the helpless descent in Hunland and the meek submission to being taken prisoner? A hundred thoughts were racing through my head, but in a moment they were dispersed. It was that always ghastly rattle of a machinegun, firing at me from the ground. This left no doubt but that I was over enemy territory. I continued to glide, listlessly toward the ground, not caring much now what the machine gun might do. My plight couldn’t be much worse. I was convinced in fact that it couldn’t possibly be worse. Mechanically, little realising just what I was doing, but all the time following that first great instinct of self-preservation, I remember carefully picking out a clear path in the rough terrain beneath me, and, making a last turn, I glided into it and landed.
    Some hostile spirit within me made me seize the rocket pistol we used to fire signals with in the air—Very lights, they are called. What I expected to do with such an impotent weapon of offence or defence, I don’t know, but it gave me a sort of armed feeling as I jumped out of the machine. I ran to a nearby ditch, following the irresistible battlefield impulse to “take cover.” I lay for some time in the ditch waiting—waiting for my fate—whatever it was to be. Then I saw some people crawling toward me. They were anxious moments, and I had to rub my eyes two or three times before finally convincing myself that the oncoming uniforms were of muddy-brown and homely, if you will, but to me that day, khaki was the most wonderful, the most inspiring, the most soul-satisfying colour-scheme ever beheld by the eyes of man. In an instant my whole life-outlook changed; literally it seemed to me that by some miracle I had come back from the land of the “missing.”
    The British “Tommies” had seen me land and had bravely crawled out to help me. They told me I had just barely crossed over into our own country; the last 150 yards of my glide had landed me clear of the Germans. The soldiers also said we had better try to move the machine, as the Germans could see it from the hill opposite and would be sure to shell it in a very little while.
    With the help of several other men from a field artillery battery, we hauled the machine into a little valley just before the German shells began to arrive. One dropped with a noisy bang some 200 yards away from us, and I fell flat on my stomach. I hadn’t seen much land fighting up to this time, but I had been told that that was the proper thing to do. The Tommies, however, looked at me with amazement. The idea of anybody dropping from a shell two hundred yards away! They told me there was nothing to worry about for the moment, and added, cheerfully, that in a few minutes the Huns would be doing a little better shooting.
    But I had my own back with the Tommies sooner than I could ever have hoped for. This time a shell landed about twenty yards from us and down went everybody but me. I stood up—out of sheer ignorance! I didn’t know by the sound of the shell how close it was going to land, but the others did and acted accordingly. The joke of the whole thing was that the shell was a “dud.” It didn’t explode, and I had the laugh on the wise artillerymen.
    Eventually we got the machine behind a clump of trees where the Germans couldn’t see it, and they decided to waste no more ammunition hunting us out. Although it was already six o’clock in the evening, I started to work on the engine, but after an hour and a half had not succeeded in getting a single cough out of any one of the many cylinders. So I decided to let matters rest and accept a very cordial invitation to