They had, however, been discovered. Had not a fleet of battleplanes risen to meet the Germans from behind the French lines, the two tardy flying machines must have been swooped upon by a whole army of Boches.
As it was, three of the enemy machines attacked the Voisin and accompanying Nieuport.
Sanderson left Belinda strapped to her seat and did good service with the machine gun. He almost immediately got one of the three enemy airplanes and the girl saw the aviator and his machine—the latter on fire—go spinning down the airways to a dreadful fall.
She was in the midst of battle and sudden, awful death. This was far worse than anything she had dreamed of in all her field hospital experience.
The thundering of the trench cannon, the bursting of shells, the results of the earth conflict, were dwarfed by what she now saw.
Men fighting, almost hand to hand, in the unstable air! It was the conflict of a nightmare—not reality! The Red Cross nurse, used as she had become to the horrors of warfare, had never seen anything like this.
The roaring of the motor drowned most other sounds. Yet there was an insistent whining in her ears that could not be the wind singing through the wires of the airplane.
A cable snapped, coiling in an ever-agitated, vibrating spiral. That was no mere incident of flying! She saw the pilot's cap suddenly torn open. A gory smear appeared along the side of his head above his exposed ear!
The bullets were flying like gnats about them.
She beheld Sanderson, working madly the crank of the machine gun, suddenly sway backward and clap his uninjured hand to his wounded shoulder.