"Great Scott! The whole place is alive with Fokkers, Rolands and Aviatiks!"
Then followed a fierce running fight, in which the English were outnumbered three to one. The enemy were all around them, for they had been called by wireless from every direction. Dastral headed his men into the thick of the combat. Three German 'planes were brought down, and not till every round of ammunition was fired, and every drum empty did the Commander call off his Flight again, or rather what was left of it.
Brum, fighting bravely to the last, had gone down in a whirling spiral after first sending down an Aviatik. Steve followed him a little later, with his machine blazing, for his petrol tank had been plugged time after time. Dastral alone, with Mac, both their machines damaged beyond repair and both their observers wounded, staggered through the curtain fire at the trenches later in the morning, and came to earth just behind the British first line.
CHAPTER V
A BOMBING RAID
DAWN was just breaking over Devil's Wood and Ginchy. The owls and bats which had flitted over the night-bivouacs had returned to their hiding places about the battered towers of the old church near by. A saffron tint flushed the low summit of the eastern ridge, beyond Combles and Ginchy, while thin blue-grey columns of smoke showed where the Germans held fast their steel line from the Somme to Bapaume.
Scarcely had the stars faded away, however, and disappeared in the morning light, when the little field telephone in the orderly officer's tent at the aerodrome near Contalmaison went "Ting-a-ling-ling!"
"Are you there?" came the query over the wire.
"Yes. Who is that?"