"I could hardly believe my eyes. Yet there could be no mistake. He went over the side of his fuselage and dropped like a man who intended dropping just a few yards. I could see that he fell feet first, head up, and arms stretched up above his head, holding his body rigidly straight. Neither I nor my observer saw him the moment he left his seat, but both of us saw him leave the side of his machine and start down, down, down on that long four-mile drop.
"He disappeared, still rigidly straight, with something about his position that made us both remark afterwards that he looked as though he was doing it quite voluntarily and had planned it all out just that way. It was weird.
"Of course it all happened in a twinkling. The big plane in front of us went on uncannily, without a tremor, apparently. An instant afterwards my observer and I exclaimed loudly together. The observer in the enemy plane had not fired a shot, probably for the reason that his gun was fixed and we were never in range of it. Suddenly we saw him climb out of his seat on to the tail of the plane. My observer had a good target, but his gun was silent. Perhaps that Boche observer had an idea of climbing into the seat vacated so curiously by the pilot, dropping, dropping, dropping, down that trackless four mile path we had come up. If he had such a plan it failed almost before he started to put it into execution.
"He had no more than climbed out on the tail proper than he lost his hold and plunged headlong after his comrade. He went down pawing and clutching into the void below like a lost soul, in horrible contrast to the rigid figure of the pilot. Then the aviatik turned its nose down with a jerk and fell after its human freight, all the long twenty thousand feet to the earth below.
"We did not say a word to each other till we landed. It gave me a nasty shock. I had seen enemy planes go down with enemy fliers in them, but that rigid figure got me. The struggling chap I forgot long before I did the other. We more than once discussed what might have happened to him, and what his idea might have been—-but without being able to frame any explanation. It was just weird. We let it go at that."
As Will ended his story he pulled out his khaki handkerchief and wiped the perspiration from his forehead. The night was anything but warm, and the room in which they sat was quite cool; but the memory of that scene, four miles up, brought the moisture to Will's brow, after months had passed since the occurrence.
Two young officers in the mess had been interested listeners. One of them, a slight youth named Mason, who hailed from the Pacific Coast, now joined in the conversation.
"There has been an instance of an observer taking control of a plane and effecting a good landing after his pilot had been killed," said Mason. "He came down not a long way from an airdrome where I was stationed. A bit of anti-aircraft shrapnel caught the pilot in the back. It did not kill him instantly, but he was not long in succumbing to his wound. He had just energy enough left, after he realized that he was very badly hurt, to tell his observer that he was going off. Before he actually relinquished control of the machine, the observer, who was a daring chap, climbed right out of his seat, pulled himself along the fuselage, and half-sitting, half-lying, managed to stick there, within reach of the control levers and the engine cut-off.
"He was an old-time flyer himself, and understood aeroplane construction pretty well, and he made a very decent landing not very far from our front lines. Fortunately he was on the right side of them, though from what he told us afterward that was more luck than judgment. He thought he was much further back than he was.
"He had become very tired, owing to his strained position on the body of the plane, and was afraid he would fall off. So he came down. He had a bad shock when he found that his pilot was stone dead, and had been for some time. He must have died when the observer took over the control of the plane, but the observer, oddly enough, never thought of him as dead, and quite expected to be able to bring him around if he once got him safely landed."