With Haig on the Somme

by D. H. Parry

The whir and throb of their pursuers already seemed to come from every point of the compass—from below, from either side and, what was more alarming, from above; but banking sharply to the right he thrashed his course at topmost speed, praying that the cloud-bank might not cease.

The baragraph showed him that he was already eight thousand feet above the earth, and, straightening out the machine, he wiped the mist from his goggles with the back of his glove and kept on.

All at once the Aviatik shot out of the cloud with a clear stretch of sky in front of them, and, looking back and upwards, he saw the wicked nose of a Fokker emerge into view on their right beam a couple of hundred yards away and well above them.

Already their own machine was approaching another cloud-bank, but the Fokker had seen them, and plunged downward in their direction.

The instant the cloud swallowed them up Dennis concentrated all his efforts on the foot-bar which controlled the vertical rudder, and, grasping the wheel at the same time, swung sharply to the left, leaving their pursuer to dive down five hundred feet into space before he discovered that he had missed his mark.

Neither of them knew that the nose of the Fokker had been within twelve inches of the Aviatik's tail-planes; and but for the fact that the German suspended his fire at the moment of diving, it would have been all over with the raiders.

Dennis reverted to his old tactics when he found that they had escaped, and turning to the right again, with an anxious eye on the compass, saw no more of the enemy for nearly a quarter of an hour, until, emerging into a burst of bright sunshine and looking down, he found himself immediately over a fierce engagement on the eastern crest of the Vosges mountains. Shells were bursting below them, and though he did not know it, they were passing above the Col de la Schlucht, from which the French guns were bombarding Munster. He could see the enormous puffs of smoke—white, black, and some of them tinged with yellow—but what was of greater moment to them both was the presence of the enemy machines a few miles to the southward.

They, too, were just leaving the cloud-bank, which ended there, misled by the idea that their prey would make a bee-line for safety; but they saw the Aviatik at the same moment that Dennis saw them, and circled round to cut him off from home.

Dennis realised that he was now above French soil. His engines were working magnificently, and dropping to an altitude of two thousand metres, which gave him a clear view of towns and buildings, he consulted his chart, identified Nancy far away on his right front, and trusted all to Providence.

He had judged wisely, as it proved, and knew that he was out-distancing the enemy aircraft tearing in hot pursuit—all but one persistent Fokker that evidently meant business. He even found time to glance backward at his companion, who, with the folds of the French flag wrapped round his shattered shoulder to dull the force of the keen air, sat huddled up in his cockpit, apparently insensible.