Winged Warfare by William Avery Bishop Page B

Major’s machine as I flashed by him, and I fired at a bare ten yards range. Then I passed on to the second enemy machine, firing all the while and eventually passing within five feet of one of his wingtips. Turning my machine as quickly as I could I was yet too late to catch the other two of the formation of four. They had both dived away and escaped. I had hit the two that first attacked the Major, however, and they were at the moment falling completely out of control a thousand or more feet below me, and finally went through the clouds, floundering helplessly in the air.
    This little interruption ended, we all reassembled in our former positions and went on with the photographing. This was finished in about fifteen minutes, and, under a very heavy anti-aircraft fire, we returned home. The episode of the four Huns was perhaps the most successful bit of trapping I have ever seen, but it was many weeks before the squadron got through teasing me for using our commander as a decoy. I apologised to the Major, who agreed with me that the chance was too good a one to miss.
    â€œDon’t mind me,” he said; “carry on.”

Chapter X
    Just to show there was no hard feeling, the Major that afternoon proposed some excitement of an entirely different sort. There was no patrol marked down for us, so the Major took another pilot and myself out on a sort of Cook’s tour. We called it “seeing the war.” We all piled into an automobile, drove through poor old shell-torn Arras, which was fairly stiff with troops moving up toward the front, and with relieved divisions that were coming out of the line for hard-earned rest. Occasionally there was the screech of a “Whistling Percy” overhead—a shell from a long-range 16-inch naval gun some miles beyond the German lines. It was vastly different from flying, this motoring through Arras, threading your way tediously in and out of the marching troops and the interminable traffic of offensive warfare.
    Finally we passed the railway station, which had long been a favourite target for the German gunners, but still showed some semblance of its former utility; turned “dead man’s corner” into the road for Cambrai, proceeded over what had once been our front line, then over the old No Man’s Land and finally came to a halt some miles beyond the city. There we left the car behind the crest of a hill, and out of direct observation from the enemy trenches which were not very far away. We were very bold, we three musketeers of the upper air, as we set out afoot, without a guide, to make our way toward a German machine that had been brought down a few days before just inside our lines.
    On the way we had to pass about thirty batteries of artillery and as no one said anything to us we presumed we were all right in strolling along in front of them. The guns seemed harmless enough, sitting there so cold and silent. However, before we had gone so very far, a man crawled out of a hole in the ground and told us that if we were going anywhere in particular we had better hurry, as a battle was due to start in just five minutes. We questioned him about the “show,” and then decided to walk on as fast as we could and reach the village of Monchy, which sat a mass of ruins on a little hill, and was just two hundred yards within our lines.
    Monchy-le-Preux, to give the little town the full dignity of its Artois name, is about five miles east of Arras and was the final fixed objective of the Easter drive. It is the highest bit of ground between Arras and the German border. Around it swirled some of the most desperate fighting of the entire war. It had been a pretty little place up to a few days before, but the moment the Germans had been driven from their defensive works about the village, many of them at the point of the bayonet, the German artillery was turned on Monchy in a perfect torrent of explosive shells. What had once been houses quickly