AIRPLANES ATTACK TROOPS.
Airplanes attacked troops in the support trenches and sent them scurrying to the cover of their dugouts. One pilot made so many of these attacks that he finally ran out of ammunition, but he delivered his last stroke by letting go his signal rockets at a platoon of soldiers who, evidently mistaking this for some particularly horrible new style of war frightfulness, fled in all directions.
German troops were fired upon in the more distant back areas as they were entraining for the front. Many of the enemy retreating from the British attack and hiding in shell holes were seen by the low-flying airmen and pelted with bullets.
One British pilot patrolled a road for half an hour before he saw anything to shoot at. Then a German military automobile with three officers sitting in the back seat came along. The Britisher dived at them from a height of three hundred feet, firing at them as they came. He flew so low eventually that the wheels of his under carriage barely missed the automobile, which swerved into a ditch while going at about forty miles an hour and crashed into a tree.
This same pilot later came across an active field gun battery and charged it, scattering the gun crew and hitting a number of them. Still further along he attacked a column of Germans marching in fours. The column broke when he opened fire, scattering to both sides of the road. At no time during his stay inside the German lines was this pilot more than 500 feet from the ground.
ON CONTACT PATROL WORK.
Large numbers of British machines were on contact patrol work, flying low over the advancing lines of infantry, constantly watching their movements, their progress, any temporary reverse, any attempt to form counter-attacks and all the while sending detailed reports back to corps and army headquarters.
Of the fourteen planes lost during the day of the battle, a majority were those contact machines. They had to fly through a frightful storm of their own as well as the enemy's artillery fire, and they succumbed to chance blows from these exploding missiles.
Late on the day of the battle, when the enemy machines had finally arrived from more distant airdromes, there was some good fighting in the air, some of it at close quarters with collisions barely avoided. Twenty enemy machines were accounted for in the fighting, some flopping about until they broke up in the air and others being driven down on their noses in yellow buttercup fields so far back of the fighting line that no shell had ever marred the symmetry of the landscape.
Some of the most marvelous work was done by artillery airships. One squadron of these alone, acting with several batteries of British heavies, succeeded in silencing seventy-two German batteries before six o'clock on the morning of the attack which began at 3.10 o'clock in the morning. These planes also directed the firing on the enemy's guns en route to the front, some of the big weapons being drawn by caterpillar tractors. Wherever a thousand or more troops were observed forming for possible counter-attacks the artillery planes directed "shoots" upon them.