"All right, old fellow. It was only a joke," came back the reply through the speaking-tube.
They received another baptism of fire as they reached the outskirts of the city, but, skirting round to the right, they avoided the heavy fire of the forts at Deutz, for Dastral knew that the brutes were not shooting badly to-day, and he was anxious not to have a single machine crippled before his mission was completed.
"There'll be plenty of fighting soon, my boy!" called Dastral. "The enemy will have guessed our objective by this time and they will be preparing a reception for us."
The observer nodded, for he knew that the fires down below would be busy, and the various German Commands would be communicating with Essen and the arsenal at Krupps'. There was no time to lose, and so, despite the cold, they were still doing about one hundred and twenty miles an hour.
"Dusseldorf!" soon came from the observer's nascelle, for they had passed Coblentz, and many other towns and villages that lay about the slopes of the Rhine.
"See that!" shouted Jock.
Dastral again looked in the direction pointed out by his comrade, and he beheld a great blur of smoke on the right, which blotted out the landscape.
It was Germany's black country. Here the towns were clustered thickly together. Elberfeld, Barmen, Essen, and to the west of the last-mentioned town lay the mighty works of Krupps. Somewhere in that cloud of smoke lay the object of their long flight.
The Flight-Commander pointed his machine in the direction indicated, and the rest followed. The real fight was about to begin at last. How would they come out of it?
They were all eager to begin, for each machine carried a couple of the new land torpedoes, in addition to a number of twenty pound bombs.