On the first night the bombardment was unsuccessful. Sanderson had been on several such errands before, but usually as a pilot of a guarding battleplane. The actual dropping of the bombs became his duty on this occasion, and likewise upon the following night.
He left Captain Dexter fuming and fussing at the aviation quarters because he could not go with the flying squadron. The shipmaster had actually learned a good bit about aviation and only his age kept him from volunteering for work at the front as a pilot.
Indeed, his age had not deterred him from volunteering, only it had caused the authorities to refuse his services. When Mademoiselle Roberta Melnotte heard of his attempt to enlist in the Flying Corps she was vastly perturbed. She was almost ready to put on her hat and rush to the authorities to oppose his enlistment, believing that he surely would be accepted.
"He is a so-brave man, that Monsieur le Capitaine Dexter," she explained to a friend in the American embassy. "He has the spirit of a boy. He has already learned—ma foi!—to pilot an aeroplane. Next, I suppose, he will seek to be commander of a submarine. He declares he did not promise his three daughters, Mesdames Prudence, Patience and Penelope, not to sail either in the air or beneath the sea."
Captain Dexter had presented two fully equipped aeroplanes to the Lafayette Escadrille, and they would soon be shipped to the front. Frank Sanderson was to pilot one of them when it arrived. He was now, however, engaged with the bombarding unit and was bomb-dropper on a machine the night that the attack upon the railroad line behind the German battlefront was successful.
A man named Lefevre, an American, was with Sanderson and drove the airplane. They got a flash signal from the captain of the squadron about two o'clock in the morning that the railroad line had been found.
Having been flying high, they descended quickly, and, the night being dark with a haze overhead that quite hid the stars, the pilot had to depend almost entirely upon the indicating barometer for a knowledge of their height above the ground.
"We're getting close to it, Lefevre, I believe," Sanderson urged. "I've the feel of the ground in me. This wind has blown over a swamp—I can smell it."
"Must be we're in a hollow between hills, then," rejoined the pilot. "Look at the barom," and he flashed a tiny spark of light upon the face of the altimetre.
"Go easy, then——"