Again Dastral jammed the controls hard over, and though he knew he was fighting a different creature altogether this time, he tried his old tactics. He swept down as though to collide with the enemy and crash with him to earth, for he knew this was the best method of unnerving the Hun. With his feet on the rudder bar, and the joy-stick between his knees, and his hands clear for his gun, he fired two drums, but seeing no immediate effect, he flattened out suddenly, when only fifty feet from the Bosche, and pulling the switch of his bomb release, he dropped a twenty-pound bomb fairly on to the central armoured car of the monster.
Scarcely had he swept past his adversary when the thing exploded at close quarters, causing him almost unconsciously to loop the loop twice in rapid succession, for the very atmosphere seemed to be blown away from his propeller blades, and the air was so full of air-pockets that for a moment this daring aviator was in imminent danger of a side-slip and a fearful crash to the earth.
It was over in a minute, however, and the "Boom-m-m-m!" of the explosion and the smother of gas, smoke and flame being past, he looked round him, and saw the German three hundred feet below him, with half his central armoured car blown away, and with both gunners apparently lifeless, and the pilot, bleeding, still sticking it grimly, trying to volplane his machine to the ground.
The Flight-Commander looked down, and sweeping round till he had gained his old position, he was about to drop a second bomb to finish the warplane, but he withdrew his hand from the bomb release, saying:
"Poor bounder! He's bound to go down. He cannot get her over the lines. I'll let him alone."
Then, looking around for the third machine, he was just in time to see her disappear eastward towards her own lines, and saw two English 'planes, which seemed to have come from nowhere, following her.
"Ah, well, I'll go down and receive that chap's surrender--that is, if he can manage to get down without a crash."
There is, apparently, more honour in aerial fighting in these days than in any other field of warfare, and, when a pilot has brought his man down, should he fall, say, into the conqueror's lines, very often the victor will descend and receive the surrender of the vanquished.
Dastral's professional curiosity also urged him to do this. The huge machine was of a new type, for in all his experience he had seen nothing like it, and he was eager to examine it.
Keeping his eye, therefore, on the descending German, who was trying with the utmost care to navigate the aerial monster to the ground, Dastral banked, then spiralled, and after one or two rapid nose-dives, planed swiftly down to within a few score of yards of the place where the monster must ultimately descend; and three minutes later, having landed, he waited calmly on the ground for mein herr to complete his landing.