The blood tingled hotter in Gerry’s veins; his people were fighting! His countrymen, other than the few who from the first had been fighting in the foreign legion or scattered in Canadian regiments or here and there in the flying forces, were having part in this battle! No great part, at that; and only an accidental part. Simply a regiment of American engineers, who had been on construction work for the British Fifth Army, had thrown down their shovels and tools, grabbed guns, and gone in.
“You’ve some good girls—some awfully good girls out that way, too!” the English pilot cried.
Gerry was in his seat and starting his motor so he just heard that; he rose from the field and for several moments all his conscious attention was given to catching proper formation with the machines returning along with him to the battle; but subconsciously his mind was going to those girls, the American girls—those “awfully good” girls out that way. He did not know what they might be doing this day—what it was which won from the English pilot the praise in his voice. Gerry had known that American girls had been out “that way,” he had known about the Smith College girls, particularly—the score or so who called themselves the Smith College Relief Unit and who, he understood, had been supplying the poor peasants and looking after old people and children and doing all sorts of practical and useful things in little villages about Nesle and Ham. He did not know any of those girls; but he did know Cynthia Gail; and now, as he found himself in flight formation and flying evenly, thought of her emerged more vividly than it had previously upon that morning.
When the news had reached him far away on the evening before that the Germans had broken through in that neighborhood where she was, he had visualized her in his fears as a helpless victim before the enemy’s advance. The instincts she had stirred in him were to hurry him to her protection; that morning as he had looked down upon the refugees on the roads, mentally he had put her among the multitude fleeing and to be defended. But the shout of the English pilot had made Gerry think of her as one of those protecting—not precisely a combatant, perhaps, but certainly no mere non-combatant.
Of course the English pilot had not mentioned Cynthia Gail; but Gerry knew that if American girls were proving themselves that morning, Cynthia Gail was one of them. He had been able, in vivid moments, to see Agnes Ertyle; for he knew exactly what she would be doing; but his imagination had failed to bring before him Cynthia Gail. In the subconscious considerations which through the violence of his physical actions dwelt on such ideas, this failure had seemed proof that Agnes Ertyle alone stirred the deepest within him; but now those visions of the unseen which came quite unbidden and which he could not control showed him again and again the smooth-skinned, well-formed face with the blue, brave eyes under thoughtful brows, and the slender, rounded figure of the girl whom he knew as Cynthia Gail. And whereas previously he had merely included her among the many in peril, now dismay for her particularly throbbed through him.
Her words when they last were together—“A score or so of you felt you had to do the fighting for a hundred million of us; but you haven’t now, for we’re coming; a good many of us are here”—no longer seemed a mere appeal to him to spare himself; it told him that she was among those on the ground endeavoring to govern the fate of this day.
He sighted, before and below, a road where German guns were being rushed forward; dove down upon them, leading his flight again and bombed the guns, machine-gunned the artillerymen; he bombed a supply train of motor lorries; he flew over and machine-gunned two motor cars with German officers and saw one of the cars overturn. But German combat pilots were appearing in force all about; Gerry gazed up and saw a big, black-crossed two-seater accompanied by two single-seaters maneuvering to dive down upon him.
He swerved off, therefore, and fled. For a moment he longed for his swift-darting little Spad instead of this heavier ship which bore bombs in addition to machine guns. But the Spads of his comrades and English combat machines appeared; and the German pilots above did not dare to dive. They circled, awaiting reinforcement which swiftly came—triplane Fokkers mostly, Gerry thought. As he watched them, he forgot all about the ground; for the French and the English pilots, ten thousand feet above him, were starting an attack. He circled and climbed a few thousand feet; he knew that with his heavy raiding machine, he could not join that battle. But heavy German airplanes—for observation, for photographic work, or to guide the advancing German guns—were appearing in the lower levels and slipping forward under the protection of the Fokkers and the Albatrosses. Gerry went for one of these and turned it back; he went for another—a two-seater—and he saw the German machine gunner fall forward; he saw the pilot’s hooded head drop; he saw flame flash from the gasoline tank; the two-seater tumbled and went down.
He dared not follow it with his eyes even for the short seconds of its fall; machines from the battle above were coming down where he was. A Fokker dropped, turning over and over to escape a Spad which came down on its tail and got it anyway; now a Spad streaked past in flame. A two-seater—a German machine marked by the big black crosses under its wings—glided slowly down in a volplane. Gerry circled up to it, approaching from the side with the lanyard of his machine guns ready; but the German pilot raised an arm to signal helplessness. His gunner was dead across his guns; his engine was gone; he had kept control enough only to glide; and he was gliding, Gerry saw, with the sun on his right. That meant he was making for German-held ground. He came beside the gliding two-seater, therefore, and signaled to the west. The German obeyed and, while Gerry followed, he glided to the field in the west and landed.
Gerry came down beside him and took the pilot prisoner; together they lifted the body of the German observer from his seat and laid him on the ground. Gerry possessed himself of the German’s maps and papers.