"Huh! That's old Oberleutnant Finkelbaum from Ghistelles. He's always first!" says a wit. "Come on, Finky ... you won't be found. That's right—keep up the coast. You're after the docks, I suppose. Look out; throttle, man—throttle, or you will get caught!"
Bavoom—bavoom, throb the two engines of the bold attacker, and our sympathies and interest somehow seem to be with him.
"Turn in now, old man, turn in! Stop your engine—that's good—glide and keep throttled—you'll be all right!"
Suddenly the droning above ceases, and the silence is more threatening and sinister than the clamour. We do not feel quite so assured about the unseen enemy, since we can no longer locate his position by sound. However, we know that he is almost certain to be attacking the docks, which lie some two miles away, so we do not altogether lose the sense of being spectators.
A long minute passes slowly, then a wide fan-shaped flash of red light appears beyond the town, whose roofs are for a moment silhouetted black against its glare. It dies slowly, and another leaps up near it.
Some one begins to count—
Then rises up with an awful splendour and a strange deliberation a tall, coiling column of fire, which, like a swiftly-growing tree, opens and expands until it is nearly five hundred feet high—a huge fountain of flame. Some oil dump has been struck. It is an amazing sight. Every face, with open mouth and wondering eye, is lit for a moment in its red light, and then it slowly fades and dies away, leaving a steady glow behind the dark houses to show that a great conflagration is now in progress.
"Nine ... ten ... eleven ... twelve!" ends the count.
Then crash after crash of ear-splitting noise sounds on our ears as the noise of the twelve bursting bombs comes to our ears. The anti-aircraft guns bark and crash stupidly round us, and among the stars appear the quick and random spurts of the bursting shells. Aimless searchlights, pale and puerile, move irregularly over the sky. Still there is no sound above us.