Battlewrack

by F. Britten Austin

He was now above the enemy's left flank—a little to the right of the spot that the Commander-in-Chief had designated as the object of his possible attack. The scout switched off his engine and commenced to drop along a slant towards the centre of the enemy's position. With the sudden silencing of his engine the roar of the battle came up at him in a crash and stayed there. He glanced at the time—12.13—and gave himself a limit of two minutes in which to reconnoitre. For the moment he ignored his adversaries in the air. As he gazed down through the transparent panel between his feet, his glasses to his eyes, the ground that slid away under him appeared to be subjected to a constantly increasing magnification. Fields, houses, roads grew momentarily more distinct. Without taking his gaze from the scene below the aviator checked the drop of his machine and drove forward. Quickly his trained eye took in the details of the ground, the position and approximate numbers of the men that he saw massed in dark patches here and there. Over a long stretch of the position the enemy's line was obviously thinner. The country behind it was empty of troops. The General's intuition was correct. The enemy had weakened his left centre. Point Number One was settled. Now what had he done with the troops he had withdrawn?

As the aviator turned his machine to reconnoitre in the new direction, he was surprised to see the hostile aeroplane between him and his objective. Absorbed in his scrutiny of the ground, he had all but forgotten it. It was slightly higher than himself and about half a mile distant. He could not carry out his reconnaissance without coming into fatal proximity to its machine-gun, and he could not return directly over the battle lines without passing between the crossed fires of this and the other machine now drawing close. Even as the realisation of his position flashed on him, a narrow slit appeared in one of his planes. The nearer of his foes was already firing.

Quicker than thought he turned and raced off into the country behind the battle. A plan, the only one with a possible chance of success, had sprung into his mind. He had no intention of failing in this all-important mission of his. But first he must get out of the range of that deadly machine-gun. He dared not rise across it at barely half a mile range. At full speed he raced away, inclining his machine downwards. The hostile aeroplane followed, depressing her course likewise, to get him into the zone of her fire or to force him to the ground. The scout's speedometer registered 100 miles an hour. Beneath his feet he had glimpses of trees and houses and fields flitting past in a stream where salient features prolonged themselves into long blurred lines. They looked oddly large after the altitude at which he had been contemplating them. He threw a glance over his shoulder at his pursuers. The nearer was now rather more than a mile away. The other had apparently given up the chase. The clock showed 12.15; in less than two minutes he distanced his adversary by nearly a mile—he had therefore a superiority in speed of about twenty-five miles per hour. He did not consciously deduce this result. His trained mind working with incomputable swiftness under the stimulant of imminent danger gave the result like an intuition. His plan presented itself to him completely formed. At this distance he could risk the danger zone of the machine-gun for the few moments he would be in it. He swerved his machine upward and climbed steeply. In a minute the other aeroplane was level with him; beneath him. The scout rose along a slant, slowing down his engine until his pace was almost equal to that of the machine below. Both rose steadily.

The battle din ceased altogether behind him. He flew in the seeming silence of the roar of his own engine and the deeper bass of the other machine, just audible, below. He bent forward over his map and picked out his approximate position. Then he noted a village some twenty miles in rear of the battle, and drew an imaginary line from it south-westward to the enemy's left flank. That village was to serve as turning-point. He should reach it, he calculated, at 12.27. The barograph indicated 3000 feet and still rising.

12.25—the scout bent his eyes on the ground. A couple of minutes later a handful of white cottages flitted past as he looked down between his feet. His enemy could not be seen. The body of the monoplane hid him as he flew below and slightly in rear, but the roar of his engine, louder than the scout's own, could just be heard.

Now was the time—the scout turned off abruptly at a tangent along the line he had marked out for himself and drove his engine at its fastest. The speedometer needle oscillated over 101 miles an hour. He calculated that he had approximately twenty miles to go ere he reached the patch of country he wished to explore. He should reach the commencement of the enemy's left flank at 12.39, and be able to spend six minutes in flying over five miles of ground and then have a couple of minutes in hand. To the trained intellect behind his keen eyes six minutes were amply sufficient. Having run along the left flank it was simplicity itself to turn to the right and glide down into his own lines. There seemed nothing to stop him. The pursuing machine was being quickly left behind. The slow biplane now far off to his right could not possibly arrive in time. The sky in front was clear of any menace.

Again he began to draw close to the great belt of dust-cloud which stretched out to his right and again the din of battle began to overpower the roar of his engine. Directly ahead was a dark mass of woodland. It was from thence that the enemy's screen around the right flank of the scout's army commenced. He swerved slightly to the left, behind it. The hour was a second or two over 12.38.

Below him was a network of country roads, and from four strands of that network which ran in an approximately parallel direction, coincident with his own course, arose long dense clouds of dust. It was the dust of marching columns. The scout shot a glance back at his pursuer, assured himself that it was five or six miles in rear, and slowed down his engine as he entered upon a long, gradual descent over the route of those marching columns.

For mile after mile on those four roads the dust cloud continued. The scout checked off the distances by villages on his map. Adding the length of the four roads together he estimated that about twenty miles of road was occupied by the marching force. It was a whole army corps, then, that was endeavouring to turn their flank. In the open fields between the roads he could distinguish small bodies of cavalry advancing in the same direction. The mass on the roads was certainly infantry, broken here and there by long columns of artillery. The low dense clouds of dust kicked up by the tramp of thousands of feet were cut into short sections where the guns and wagons of the batteries rolled onward. From a rough calculation of those intersected clouds he decided that four brigades of artillery were on the march. He had descended now to 2000 feet, and he kept at that height as he roared over the plodding columns. Behind him his pursuer had lessened the distance between them, was getting dangerously close. The biplane on his right was also approaching. Nevertheless, the scout held on his way comfortably. There was nothing to prevent him carrying out his plan.