One good thing about shrapnel Gerry recognized; it spread smoke which screened the searchlight flares. Another feature was that it and the machine-gun fire was as hard on the police dogs as upon the fugitives. But that was like the Germans—when they were surprised—to let go everything at once.
Gerry jumped up and fled, taking his chances with the machine-gun bullets and with the shrapnel which burst all about at random; but he watched the searchlights and threw himself down when they threatened.
O’Malley had planned a surprise attack in force—if you can call ten unarmed men a force when attacking a German flying field. But Gerry knew that already the ten must be cut in two. Some of them probably never got out of the tunnel; the machine guns or the shrapnel surely must have accounted for one or two. He heard dogs give tongue as they were taught to do when they had caught prisoners.
The Irishman’s plan, wild enough at best, had become hopeless. Gerry had offered no other plan, because he had failed to form anything less mad. But now as he lay on the ground, while a searchlight streamed steadily above him, a plan offered itself.
This came from the clouds and from the moon shining through when, as now, the clouds split and parted—from the moon whose rising and shining full O’Malley and he had awaited. They had waited for the moon to furnish them light for their night flight in a German airplane after they got the machine. They had not thought of the moon as bringing them a “ship.” But now, above the rattle of the machine guns and between the smashings of the shrapnel, Gerry heard motors in the air and he knew that night-flying Hun-birds were up. For their pilots, too, had been waiting for the moon for practice.
It is all very well to talk about night flying in the dark; but Gerry knew how difficult—almost impossible—is flight in actual darkness. When he had been in training for night flying, years ago at his French training field, he had waited so many weeks for the moon that now he jeered at himself, lying flat under the searchlight beam, for a fool not to have thought of German flyers being up tonight.
They were up—six or eight of them at least. He could see their signal lights when he could not hear their motors. They had come overhead when the lights at the prison blazed out and the guns got going. The machine guns and the shrapnel fire ceased; only the searchlights glared out over the fields beyond the prison wire. The moon went under the clouds again. Gerry knew he could dodge the searchlights; but now he made no attempt whatever to flee. Instead, he crept back toward the prison, and between the beams of lights, which reached away to the south, almost parallel, and which swung back and forth slightly.
Except for those lights, all was black now; and Gerry knew how those searchlight beams must tempt some German cadet making his first night flight under the clouds. Gerry had been a cadet flying at night in the darkness with clouds closing overhead. He knew how strange and terrifying was the blackness of the ground; how welcome was any light giving view of a landing place. The airdrome, with its true landing lights, was two miles to the south; but what was direction, and what was a difference of two miles to a cadet coming down through the clouds, and “feeling” in the darkness for the ground? Gerry himself only a few months before, when caught by closing clouds, had come down in a field six miles from the one he sought. Indeed, French airmen flying at night had come down in German airdromes by mistake, as Germans had come down in French.
So Gerry lay in the blackness between the searchlight beams, accusing himself for dullness in not having known. If he had seen an escape before, and seen these searchlights shooting out over the fields, he might have realized how they imitated landing lights; but he had not; and O’Malley—if he lived—would be waiting for him by the flying field. No, not O’Malley. For the Irishman’s voice whispered to him gently. O’Malley dragged himself up.
“Bye, you’re hit, too?”