“He landed safely!” one man shouted frantically.
“Looks like it, but he may be unconscious and roll off any minute,” another supplemented.
Men stood breathless, their hearts seeming hardly to beat, in the face of this most thrilling of all the excitements they ever had witnessed or participated in.
Four other heavier planes stood by the smaller one as it began its descent, and then, “Look! Look!” the cry went up, as a big, swift German machine hovered for a moment in the skies like a giant vulture, then swooped downward with a speed that was startling, straight for the little group that had formed to save a single American life.
Even as it did so, two large American planes detached themselves from the bombing formation, and headed for the Boche. They took him on either side just as he opened his machine guns at the smaller planes below. Throughout the war there was a chivalry among the airmen of the enemy armies that was at once an inspiration and an honor. The few violations of it gave it greater emphasis. This pilot evidently was one of those brutes who, had he been a submarine commander, would have taken rescued men upon his deck, and then submerged, to let them drown like rats; or one, maybe, who could calmly murder children, girl children, of his own country, and mutter, “One less mouth to feed.” For it is of record that some Germans did commit these and even greater atrocities throughout the war.
From a little above and on either side of him, the American planes opened a terrible fire—it was a fire of machine gun and incendiary bullets—and a dozen struck him at the same time. There was a burst of flame that swept the plane from stem to stern; its nose suddenly turned downward, and with a dive that only narrowly missed the little group on which the German had directed his attack, he fell to earth a mixed and mangled mass of man and mechanism.
As the group of little planes flew by, not more than a hundred yards above them, on the way to a safe landing place half a mile in the rear, another shout of approval went up from the men on the ground. And just over the rear of the top wing of one of the machines a grinning face appeared and a waving arm seemed to send back a genial how-do-you-do.
It might have been the signal too, for the tremendous aerial attack that was at that moment launched upon the German gunners and infantrymen, hidden in what they believed the safe and impregnable protection of the town. Tons upon tons of highly explosive bombs were dropped, as the big fleet circled and circled over what once had been a happy and prosperous French village. A constant cloud of thick black smoke went up as incense to Mars, and every attempt of the German airmen to attack the bombers was repulsed with disaster.
Finally two swift scout planes detached themselves from the fleet, dashed for nearly a mile northward over the German army, then as suddenly turned and continuing on back beyond the machines they had helped convoy, made straight for where temporary brigade headquarters then stood.
In five minutes the orders came to the men who had witnessed these scenes.