“‘If he’s just trying his eye,’ said the Old Man, ‘it’ll give him all the better practice to follow us; while, it he’s up to mischief, it may fuss him a bit.’
“The Hun had just whirled about three or four cables’ length ahead of us, when the smoke rolling up from the funnel and the swinging bow must have told him that we were trying to give him a bit more of a run for his money. Circling on a wider turn, he came charging straight down the line of our new course, flying at what I should say was between two and three times the height of our masts. We were looking at the machine at an angle of about forty-five degrees—so that he must have been about as far ahead of us as he was high, say, a hundred yards—when I saw a small dark object detach itself from under the fuselage and begin to come directly towards us, almost as though shot from a gun.
“It was the only bomb I ever saw fall while I was in a sufficiently detached state of mind to mark what it looked like. ‘Fall’ hardly conveys a true picture of the way the thing seemed to approach, for the swift machine, speeding at perhaps
a hundred miles an hour, must have imparted, at the instant of releasing, a good deal of lateral velocity.
“At first it was coming almost head on to the way I was looking at it, and, greatly foreshortened, it had so much the appearance of a round sand-bag that it is not surprising that the skipper took it for some kind of practice dummy. ‘Probably a dud,’ I remember him saying; ‘but don’t let it hit you. Stand by to duck!’
“My next recollection is of the thing beginning to wobble a bit, probably as the nose began to tilt downward; but still it seemed to be coming straight toward us rather than simply falling. I seem to recall that the seaplane passed overhead an appreciable space before the bomb, but I must have heard it rather than seen it, for I never took my eye off the speeding missile.
“The latter seemed at the least from fifty to a hundred feet above my head as it hurtled over the starboard end of the bridge, and I saw it with startling distinctness silhouetted against a cloud that was bright with the light of the sun it had just obscured. It was still wobbling, but apparently tending to steady under the combined influence of the downward pull of the heavy head and the backward drag of the winged tail. It appeared to be revolving.
“I have since thought, however, that I may have got the latter impression from a ‘spinner’ that is
often attached to this type of bomb to unwind, with the resistance of the air, and expose the detonator.
“Down it came until it whanged against some of the standing rigging of the foremast—seeming to deflect inboard and downward slightly as a consequence—missed the mainmast by a few feet, and struck squarely against the side of the deckhouse on the poop.