The Enemy was rousing from his doze or dwam, or swoon, or whatever had been the matter with him. The big body was heaving into an upright posture, the big foot was knocking in Morse on the bottom of the fuselage. The boy looked down and saw blood running there—or was it the red of the sunset?
"Shut—off—and—look—at me," rapped the foot, and its thrall obeyed and shrieked at the sight of the horror he was strapped to, glaring with wild eyes, and spitting unintelligible sentences with bloody splinters of shattered teeth and red rags of palate and tongue.
"I am damaged, is it not so? Something hit me when the bomb exploded." Something like this came in strange sounds from that inhuman face. And the boy shrieked again and again, straining at the belt that bound him to his terrible companion, conscious of nothing but overmastering fear—
"Quit yourself like a man!"
He heard the words through the drumming in his ears and his heart left off leaping. His brain cleared. He realised that the Taube was diving to the ground. He switched on power and brought down her tail and pulled up her nose gamely. They passed through a suffocating mist of burned chemicals that deposited red powder on your hands and face, and the glass of your flying-goggles, and parched your lungs like burning Cayenne pepper—and were over the battle-zone.
As far as the eye could take it in the face of earth was moving. Death, like a many-handed mole, seemed working underground. Huge geysers of dirt and mud and stones heaved up in thick black smoke and vapour. The air shook incessantly with reduplicated concussions. Buildings tottered and sank away, and railway bridges melted, and spurts of blinding fire leaped from invisible mouths of guns.
The revolutions were slowing down. The Taube travelled painfully. Beneath her bobbed a row of sausage-shaped observation-balloons straining at their spidery cables, beyond these were the third and second German lines—whitish furrows stretching East and West, with little zig-zags, that were communicating-trenches, between. A thin blue haze of rifle and machine-gun fire hung over the pitted ground. The Advanced lines behind their smear of rust-red barbed wire might have been sixty yards from the parapet of the British trenches. Friend and foe were dying there—and over the hurly-burly, dodging Death in puffs of woolly vapour, belched from vertical mobile muzzles, directing fire, signalling, wirelessing, scouting, fighting others who assailed signallers or scouters—wheeled and circled the Birds of War. Their sharp eyes picked him out flying far down beneath them.
"There goes a Hun somebody's shrapbozzled!" said the pilot of a R.A.F.B.E., shutting off to speak to his observer.
"Going to crash in a minute," said the observer of the Bleriot Experimental. "Where, do you suppose?"
"If he keeps on at that angle," said the pilot from behind his glasses, "he'll pass over that nest of Hun machine-guns in the big shell-pit behind the German Advanced Line, at about a hundred and fifty—and pile in that ploughfield behind our Gunners."