The pilot leisurely studied the ground, shut off his gas, and glided beautifully downward until the earth rose to meet them with a rush, and the wheels of the big plane touched and ran along the grass to a gradual standstill.
Bob unstrapped himself and got out, glad to stretch his legs. But the next moment he caught sight of a wire slightly out of adjustment on the plane’s broad wing, and pointed it out to his companion. “That can’t be left, Jourdin. Shall I fix it while you go to report?”
“There’s a mechanic in the shack. I’ll bring him out,” said Jourdin. “If we wait for the repair, let us take this chance to eat our ration on the ground. We shall have fifteen minutes.”
“Good idea,” said Bob with enthusiasm. As Jourdin walked off toward the shack he brought out the little packages of food and laid them on a convenient rock. For a moment he forgot his disappointment at the morning’s failure. Nothing can rouse such an appetite as flying, and Bob had not yet learned to enjoy a meal snatched on the wing. He could read, write, think, in fact do many things during a swift flight, but he liked to eat on level ground.
When Jourdin returned and set the mechanic to work, the two young aviators took off their gloves and helmets and, sitting down, devoured their rations of sandwiches and chocolate, along with a canteen of cool water.
A gentle breeze was blowing from the west across the blackened fields. It blew the drifting smoke away from them, and except for the noise of the shells, it seemed almost peaceful in the deserted meadow. Above them the airplanes still floated, but none very near. For the time being the French scouts had given up their search. On a little rising ground not far off stood a ruined windmill, its burned stumps of arms stretching out dismally above level shell-plowed earth that had once been a green wheat-field. There was an old brick chimney near it, too—all that was left of a little farmhouse. “The Allies have got that much back, anyway,” Bob thought. “The Boches were here last winter.”
Captain Jourdin had risen to his feet and was looking off across the fields in silence. More than once in their familiar intercourse Bob had recognized moments when the Frenchman’s devoted heart was bitterly wrung, and his whole mind distracted from his work at sight of some such hard reminder of his country’s fate. The hands clasped behind his back clenched themselves tightly together as, turning, he said to Bob, “I remember the windmill when that farm was a prosperous little place. The farmer had lived there many years.”
Bob could not think of any answer. There was no asking for pity or encouragement in Jourdin’s calm, melancholy voice. It held more of resolute defiance than any German’s burst of bravado. Bob thought of the lines he had read in an English paper a few days before. They were Spoken by a Frenchman, looking over the ruined fields of France, almost as though the writer had seen Jourdin’s shining, dark eyes and written for him:
And we that remember the windmill spinning,
We may go under, but not in vain,