Ruth of the U. S. A.

by Edwin Balmer

They were scattered and few—very, very few, he saw; fewer even than he had feared when he gazed down upon them from two thousand feet higher. He had counted the forms of the dead among the holders of the hill; he could not, in that flash of vision, see that the many, many were dead; he could see only that, as he dropped down above them, few of the forms were moving. They were drawing together in little groups with bayonets flashing in the sunshine, drawing together in tens and scores and half hundreds for last desperate defense of the hill against the thousands coming to take it.

The puffing jets of German machine-gun fire, enfilading the hill from the right and from the left, shone over the ground in the morning sunshine where German machine gunners had worked their way about to fire in front of their charging troops; Gerry saw no such jets from the hill, though the charging men in gray must be in plain sight and within point-blank range at that instant from the English on the hill. The English were short of ammunition, that meant.

CHAPTER XI
THE RESISTANCE

But the English were going to fight.

This knowledge came to Gerry through the rush and suck of the final yards of his three thousand foot fall; mechanically, automatically his hands were tugging at his controls, his feet braced firm on his rudder bar as he began to bring his machine out of the fall. He had come down at terrific speed with his motor only partly shut off; he had no time, and no need, to watch his speed indicator; he knew well enough when he was on edge of the breaking strain which his wings and wires could stand. He slanted more directly toward the Germans and he was very low above the ground; still half falling, half flying—and at greater speed than ever he could have flown—he hurled himself at them, flattening out at perhaps fifty feet from the earth.

He knew—not from anything which he consciously saw nor from any conscious reckoning but by the automatism of realization and the reflex from it which guided and coordinated his mind, nerve, and muscle in these terrific instants of attack—he knew that German machine gunners were firing at him; he knew that German riflemen in the ranks which he was charging were giving him bursts of bullets as fast as they could fire; and his fingers which so tenderly had touched the release levers of his bombs, pulled them positively now; with his other hand, which held to the control stick, he had gathered the lanyard which governed his machine gun; he had adjusted it so that the slightest tug would get the guns going; he gave that tug and the reassuring, familiar jet-jet of his guns firing through his airscrew combined with the burst of his bombs below and behind.

His fingers went from his bomb levers to his throttle to open it wider; the detonations which had followed him ceased; his hand flew back to his lever and the bursts began again. All the time his hand on the control stick kept tension on the gun lanyards; ceaselessly those jets from his machine gun projected through the whorl of his airscrew.

He was killing men. He could see them, not as he killed them, but some infinitesimal of a second before; very possibly, indeed, the bullets out of those jets of his machine guns already had pierced the white flashes under the helmets which were faces of Germans gazing up at him or had riddled through the gray bulks of their bodies. But blood had not time to spot to the surface; the shock of the bullets, even when they immediately killed, had not time to dissolve the tautness of those bodies and relax them and let them down before Gerry was flown over them and was gone. He had taken position, when high in the sky a few seconds earlier, so as to sweep the length of the waves of the Germans charging; and though the swiftness of this sweep forbade him from seeing the results, he knew that with his machine guns alone he was taking off many; and though he could not now look back at all, he knew that his bombs, dropped from so close, must be killing many, many more.

The Germans attested to that; they scattered and scurried before him; he had no row of gray forms for his target now; to save his cartridges, he had to stop that steady pull on his lanyard; he pursued groups, firing short bursts of bullets till they broke and scattered again. He was not fighting alone, of course; the machines in his flight all had followed him down. He outflew the men on the ground and, rising while he turned, he got view of the field over which he had swept; two of his machines which had followed him, were rising already; the others were still flying low, attacking with machine guns and bombs; and below them, that line of the German attack was halted and broken. He could see spaces where his bombs had exploded or where the machine-gun fire from the airplanes had been most effective and gray-clad forms strewed the ground; between these spots, German officers were reforming ranks and getting men together again. Gerry opened his throttle wide and, circling, climbed a little more; and then, he dove again and gave it to these gathering men.

Gave them machine-gun fire alone, now; for his bombs were gone. He could see the work of the bombs better, and sight of that work brought him grim exultation. He was glad that this morning he was no mere duelist of the sky, darting and feinting and dashing in, spinning about and diving high in the heavens to shoot down just one enemy; here he had led an attack which had killed or disabled hundreds. This was no day to glory in single combat.