But a Ferry Pilot, you'll remember, has a "cushy job."

FOOTNOTES:

[5] Cushy=easy, soft.

XV
NO THOROUGHFARE

For a week the line had been staggering back, fighting savagely to hold their ground, being driven in, time and again, by the sheer weight of fresh German divisions brought up and hurled without a pause against them, giving way and retiring sullenly and stubbornly to fresh positions, having to endure renewed ferocious onslaughts there, and give to them again. Fighting, marching, digging in; fighting again and repeating the performance over and over for days and nights, our men were worn down dangerously near to the point of exhaustion and collapse, the point over which the Germans strove to thrust them, the point where human endurance could no longer stand the strain, and the breaking, crumbling line would give the opening for which the Germans fought so hard, the opening through which they would pour their masses and cut the Allied armies in two.

Now at the end of a week it looked as if their aim was dangerously near attainment. On one portion of the line especially the strain had been tremendous, and the men, hard driven and harassed for two days and nights almost without a break, were staggering on their feet, stupid with fatigue, dazed for want of sleep. Of all their privations this want of sleep was the hardest and cruellest. The men longed for nothing more than a chance to throw themselves on the ground, to fling down on the roadside, in the ditches, anywhere, anyhow, and close their aching eyes and sink in deep, deep sleep. But there was no faintest hope of sleep for them. They had been warned that all the signs were of a fresh great attack being launched on them about dusk, by more of those apparently inexhaustible fresh enemy divisions. The divisions they had fought all day were being held stubbornly by rear-guard actions until the new positions were established; and plain word had been brought in by reconnoitring air men of the new masses pressing up by road and rail to converge with all their weight on the weakened line and the worn-out men who made ready to hold it. Everyone knew what was coming. Company and battalion officers scanned the ground and picked positions for trenches and machine-guns to sweep the attack; Generals Commanding pored over maps and contours and sought points where concentrated shell-fire might best check the masses. And all who knew anything knew that it was no more than a forlorn hope that if once those fresh divisions came to close quarters they could be beaten back. Our men would be outnumbered, would be unrested and worn with fighting and digging and marching continuously,—that was the rub; if our men could have a rest, a few hours' sleep, a chance to recuperate, they could make some sort of a show, put up a decent fight again, hold on long enough to give the promised reinforcements time to come up, the guns to take up new positions. But "a renewed attack in force must be expected by dusk" said the word that came to them, and every precious minute until then must be filled with moving the tired men into position, doing their utmost to dig in and make some kind of defensive line. It looked bad.

But there were other plans in the making, plans figured out on wider reaching lines, offering the one chance of success in attacking the fresh enemy masses at their most vulnerable points, fifteen, twenty miles away from our weary line. The plans were completed and worked out in detail and passed down the chain to the air Squadrons; and Flight by Flight the pilots and observers loaded up to the full capacity of their machines with bombs and machine-gun ammunition and went droning out over the heads of the working troops digging the fresh line, over the scattered outpost and rear-guard lines where the Germans pressed tentatively and waited for the new reinforcements that were to recommence the fierce "hammer-blow" attacks, on over the dribbling streams of transport and men moving by many paths into the battle line, on to where the main streams ran full flood on road and rail—and where the streams could best be dammed and diverted.

The air Squadrons went in force to their work, bent all their energies for the moment to the one great task of breaking up the masses before they could bring their weight into the line, of upsetting the careful time-table which the enemy must lay down and follow if they were to handle with any success the huge bulk of traffic they were putting on road and rail. Each Flight and Squadron had its own appointed work and place, its carefully detailed orders of how and where to go about their business. In one Squadron, where the C.O. held council with his Flight Leaders and explained the position and pointed out the plans, one of his Captains summed up the instructions in a sentence. "That bit of road," he said with his finger on the map, "you want us to see it's 'No Thoroughfare' for the Hun up to dark?"