When this journey ended it was in territory remote from that of any former experience of the Aëroplane Scouts—a new battle landscape. It had snowed, and the drab, brown plain of Poland had turned to glistening white. The biplanes floated in a tarnished silver sky, which, pressing down, seemed hardly higher than a gray ceiling. The aviators landed on the clay bank of the winding yellow river, the Bzura, within 400 paces of the German trenches. Gun answered gun across the golden stream, shell on shell spattered into the soft earth, and rifles rattled unceasingly.
Schneider sniffed the powder smoke like a seasoned warhorse. "It's the life!" he exclaimed.
"And the death," added Roque.
He knew that men lay bleeding and broken on the banks of this yellow streak in the white picture.
"You're just right, boss," murmured Billy, nodding his hooded head, "the war map looks all red to me."
Roque, as usual, wherever he went or wherever he was, seemed to carry an Aladdin magic carpet on which to sail, for in the next flight of the biplanes a few miles distant he found a bright spot in this winter scene of rack and ruin—a clean, white lodgekeeper's kitchen, where a canary sang, and where the aërial wayfarers rested and were fed.
"I'll show you even better," he said, "when we break into Warsaw."
The chief also had a particular crow to pick with the defenders of the Polish capital. One of his men, for some time operating with the Russians, had been detected, and the end of a story of brilliant secret service achievement was marked by a little mound of earth in a Warsaw stable yard.
But for the present there were busy days ahead for the aviators in reconnoitering the Russian lines.
Most of the aërial work here was over a plain, flat as a floor. Black dots here and there marked isolated houses, and the Kalish road was bordered by a line of leafless trees with smooth trunks, which reminded the young pilots of a rank of grenadiers.