“Luckily the enemy had given us up for lost, had ceased to shoot, and we immediately began to climb again. Then the Germans opened fire, and we only escaped with our lives through the superb pilotage of L——, with one leg shattered and blood flowing in streams. At 8000 feet he again seemed to be sinking. I hastily scrawled a note urging him to descend. He read it, shook his head decidedly, pointed to me with a smile on his white drawn face, then pointed in the direction of our lines, and carried on.
“At times he would faint, and then, recovering himself, redouble his efforts. At last we were over the lines, but it seemed utterly impossible that he should be able to land the machine in his condition. But he did. Choosing a large green meadow about three miles behind the trenches, he landed as gently and as easily as if he had only been up for a practice flight, brought the machine to a stop, and fainted dead away.”
This gallant pilot, as he lay mortally wounded in the field hospital, and knowing that he was dying, thought only of the terrible time his observer must have had. Thus he wrote to his mother in England:—
“Mummy dear,
“Don’t be alarmed at my little escapade; will be all right again soon and be with you.... Poor P——, what an awful time he must have had after I fainted and we were nose-diving headlong for the ground!
“P. S.—Please don’t go talking about this business to all the old dowagers of your acquaintance.”
Officer R—— M—— was on a bomb-dropping and reconnaissance expedition in the neighborhood of Y—— in the late summer of 1915. When twenty miles from our lines he was hit by shrapnel and mortally wounded in the thigh, but making up his mind not to be taken prisoner, he kept bravely on, crossed the lines, and disdaining to take advantage of the cover thus afforded and land in the first available spot, kept resolutely on to the aerodrome from which he had set out, though losing blood rapidly and knowing he had not long to live. There he made a beautiful landing, handed in his report, and fell unconscious, never to come round again.
Early in the present year an air raid was organized to bomb a town not far from Constantinople. The raid was duly carried out, but on the journey home one of our aeroplanes was hit by a shell and forced to come to earth in marsh lands beside a small river. Immediately a party of Turkish infantry rushed up to take charge of the craft, but before they could reach it another of our machines swooped down on the scene and landed close by. The pilot jumped out, ran across a field swept by Turkish rifle fire, picked up the wounded pilot, and placing him on his back, staggered across to his own machine. Still subjected to a violent fusillade, he unthrottled his engine, and with the wounded man carried before him, bravely flew off and made his own base again.