But with his splendid courage, he suddenly braced. We were about 1700 feet above the enemy lines when he again succeeded taking direction of the machine. To have tried to climb directly up again in the enemy fire must have meant our destruction. We would have been too fair a target. Instead, Larkin boldly shot straight downward directly toward the aërial batteries and the trenches. They thought us hit and falling and fled from their places in fear of being caught in the crash.
Larkin shot his plane not fifty feet above the Boche trenches, but none of them took even so much as a rifle shot at us. They either ran or cowered in the trenches as we swept past. Then he shot up again, cleared a small, wooded section of knolls and dropped behind them, thus successfully getting out of the range of the archeys.
Larkin turned once again to me his blood-reddened countenance. This time he grinned bravely, coolly.
“It’s quite all right, Dave,” he called. “The wounds are nothing. I’m feeling quite fit again. We’ve got to spot that battery.”
So up we went. We mounted some 15,000 feet. The archeys promptly and furiously got after us again. They spread a circular fire about us. That is the way the archeys go after aëroplanes, not shooting directly at them but trying to surround them with a fire that must smash them whichever direction they may take in seeking to escape destruction.
Meanwhile, I was working my camera for all it was worth and peering upon and around the country with my glasses. There were several small clutters of heavily wooded knolls marking the landscape below us and the rattle and roar of the archeys were suddenly joined by the crash and boom of bigger guns and the distant reply of our own batteries.
I began banging my wireless exultantly. For down in the largest clutter of knolls, under a cloak of foliage so naturally dense and perhaps artificially assisted and affording full concealment ordinarily, I had seen that instant sudden sparks or flares as emitted from the throats of the big batteries’ guns in action.
Additionally, I dropped red lights visible in the daylight, over the battery’s position, which was hardly necessary, for my wireless was working perfectly and I soon was giving them the enemy’s range.
But the first fire from our side was poor and I was therefore excited and indignant.
“What the devil’s the matter with you?” I wirelessed, repeating the instructions. “If you can’t do better than that, I’ll have to get the infantry to teach you how to shoot!”