BUT the English were going to fight.
This knowledge came to Gerry through the rush and suck of the final yards of his three thousand foot fall; mechanically, automatically his hands were tugging at his controls, his feet braced firm on his rudder bar as he began to bring his machine out of the fall. He had come down at terrific speed with his motor only partly shut off; he had no time, and no need, to watch his speed indicator; he knew well enough when he was on edge of the breaking strain which his wings and wires could stand. He slanted more directly toward the Germans and he was very low above the ground; still half falling, half flying—and at greater speed than ever he could have flown—he hurled himself at them, flattening out at perhaps fifty feet from the earth.
He knew—not from anything which he consciously saw nor from any conscious reckoning but by the automatism of realization and the reflex from it which guided and coordinated his mind, nerve, and muscle in these terrific instants of attack—he knew that German machine gunners were firing at him; he knew that German riflemen in the ranks which he was charging were giving him bursts of bullets as fast as they could fire; and his fingers which so tenderly had touched the release levers of his bombs, pulled them positively now; with his other hand, which held to the control stick, he had gathered the lanyard which governed his machine gun; he had adjusted it so that the slightest tug would get the guns going; he gave that tug and the reassuring, familiar jet-jet of his guns firing through his airscrew combined with the burst of his bombs below and behind.
His fingers went from his bomb levers to his throttle to open it wider; the detonations which had followed him, ceased; his hand flew back to his lever and the bursts began again. All the time his hand on the control stick kept tension on the gun lanyards; ceaselessly those jets from his machine gun projected through the whorl of his airscrew.
He was killing men. He could see them, not as he killed them, but some infinitesimal of a second before; very possibly, indeed, the bullets out of those jets of his machine guns already had pierced the white flashes under the helmets which were faces of Germans gazing up at him or had riddled through the gray bulks of their bodies. But blood had not time to spot to the surface; the shock of the bullets, even when they immediately killed, had not time to dissolve the tautness of those bodies and relax them and let them down before Gerry was flown over them and was gone. He had taken position, when high in the sky a few seconds earlier, so as to sweep the length of the waves of the Germans charging; and though the swiftness of this sweep forbade him from seeing the results, he knew that with his machine guns alone he was taking off many; and though he could not now look back at all, he knew that his bombs, dropped from so close, must be killing many, many more.
The Germans attested to that; they scattered and scurried before him; he had no row of gray forms for his target now; to save his cartridges, he had to stop that steady pull on his lanyard; he pursued groups, firing short bursts of bullets till they broke and scattered again. He was not fighting alone, of course; the machines in his flight all had followed him down. He outflew the men on the ground and, rising while he turned, he got view of the field over which he had swept; two of his machines which had followed him, were rising already; the others were still flying low, attacking with machine guns and bombs; and below them, that line of the German attack was halted and broken. He could see spaces where his bombs had exploded or where the machine-gun fire from the airplanes had been most effective and gray-clad forms strewed the ground; between these spots, German officers were reforming ranks and getting men together again. Gerry opened his throttle wide and, circling, climbed a little more; and then, he dove again and gave it to these gathering men.
Gave them machine-gun fire alone, now; for his bombs were gone. He could see the work of the bombs better, and sight of that work brought him grim exultation. He was glad that this morning he was no mere duelist of the sky, darting and feinting and dashing in, spinning about and diving high in the heavens to shoot down just one enemy; here he had led an attack which had killed or disabled hundreds. This was no day to glory in single combat.
He had overflown again the men on the ground and, climbing once more, he got view of the crest of the slope. It was gray! Gray-clad men were swarming all over it; gray—Germans! Brown men battled them; bayonets glinted in the sun; the brown men dropped; gray men toppled, too; but there were more of the gray all about. How they had got up there, Gerry could not tell; they might be some of those in the waves at which he had fired and who had gone on; they might be a different battalion which had charged in from the flank. They were there; they had taken the hill; they were slaying the last of the English. Gerry saw the swirls of the brown and gray where a few survivors, surrounded, were fighting hand to hand to the last. He forced down the nose of his machine and dropped at them; he let go one burst of bullets into the gray; let go another and now, as he pulled on his lanyard, the airscrew before him whirled clear; the jets did not project through it; his machine guns were silent; their ammunition was spent.
He had a mad impulse, when he realized this, to swerve lower and make himself and his machine a mighty projectile to scythe those German heads with the edges of his wings; he could kill—he was calculating, in one of those flashes which consume no reckonable time, the number of gray men he could hope to kill. Ten or a dozen, at most; and he had just slain—and therefore again that day might slay—a hundred. But that instinct did not decide him. Among the gray men, in the only groups upon which he could thus drop, were brown men, so with his free hand he pulled out his automatic pistol and, as he flew barely above the helmets of the men in the mêlée, he emptied the magazine.
English soldiers glanced up at him; ten feet below him were English boys, doomed, surrounded but fighting. It struck shame through Gerry the next moment when he was rising clear and safe that a few seconds before he could have been almost within hand reach of those English boys fighting to the end on the ground; that, indeed, he had for a moment fought with them and then he had deserted them to their death while he had flown free. He looked back, half banking his machine about; but already the battle upon that hill crest was over; the last of the English were killed. Gerry could return only to avenge them; and the way to avenge was with refilled bomb racks and machine-gun magazines.
That dive to the top of the hill had separated him from the other machines in his flight except one which was following him on his return to the airdrome for ammunition and bombs. Gerry, gazing down, found disorganization more visible than when he had flown to the front. He could see the English troops, whom he had viewed advancing upon the roads, spreading out and forming a line of resistance; but he could better realize how few these English were for the needs of this mighty emergency. They were taking positions, not with any possible hope of holding them against the German masses but only with determination to fight to delay the enemy a little as Gerry, had just seen some of them fight.
He sighted his field and he swooped down upon it, leaping out as soon as he stopped. He saw that, as he had suspected, rifle or machine-gun bullets had gone through his wings; but they had not pierced spars or struts; his wires were tight. While men refilled his bomb racks and magazines and gave him fuel, he reported what he had seen and received new orders.
His superiors recognized that the disaster, instead of lessening, was growing greater each hour. Powerful French and English reserves were on the way but they were still distant; meanwhile the local reserves were being used up. The English were gathering together and throwing in anyone and everyone to try to delay the German advance; there were kilometers where only this scratch army offered resistance—sutlers, supply men, and cooks armed with rifles and machine guns fighting beside Chinese coolies impressed into a fighting line.
Gerry passed a word with an English pilot whom he knew well and who was just back from over another part of the battle field.
"Hello, Hull! Your people rather getting into it over my way!"
"Who? How?" Gerry called.
"One of your engineer regiments were working behind the lines; line came back on 'em. They grabbed guns and went in and gave it to the Huns! Should have seen 'em. Can yet; they're keeping at it."
The blood tingled hotter in Gerry's veins; his people were fighting! His countrymen, other than the few who from the first had been fighting in the foreign legion or scattered in Canadian regiments or here and there in the flying forces, were having part in this battle! No great part, at that; and only an accidental part. Simply a regiment of American engineers, who had been on construction work for the British Fifth Army, had thrown down their shovels and tools, grabbed guns, and gone in.
"You've some good girls—some awfully good girls out that way, too!" the English pilot cried.
Gerry was in his seat and starting his motor so he just heard that; he rose from the field and for several moments all his conscious attention was given to catching proper formation with the machines returning along with him to the battle; but subconsciously his mind was going to those girls, the American girls—those "awfully good" girls out that way. He did not know what they might be doing this day—what it was which won from the English pilot the praise in his voice. Gerry had known that American girls had been out "that way," he had known about the Smith College girls, particularly—the score or so who called themselves the Smith College Relief Unit and who, he understood, had been supplying the poor peasants and looking after old people and children and doing all sorts of practical and useful things in little villages about Nesle and Ham. He did not know any of those girls; but he did know Cynthia Gail; and now, as he found himself in flight formation and flying evenly, thought of her emerged more vividly than it had previously upon that morning.
When the news had reached him far away on the evening before that the Germans had broken through in that neighborhood where she was, he had visualized her in his fears as a helpless victim before the enemy's advance. The instincts she had stirred in him were to hurry him to her protection; that morning as he had looked down upon the refugees on the roads, mentally he had put her among the multitude fleeing and to be defended. But the shout of the English pilot had made Gerry think of her as one of those protecting—not precisely a combatant, perhaps, but certainly no mere non-combatant.
Of course the English pilot had not mentioned Cynthia Gail; but Gerry knew that if American girls were proving themselves that morning, Cynthia Gail was one of them. He had been able, in vivid moments, to see Agnes Ertyle; for he knew exactly what she would be doing; but his imagination had failed to bring before him Cynthia Gail. In the subconscious considerations which through the violence of his physical actions dwelt on such ideas, this failure had seemed proof that Agnes Ertyle alone stirred the deepest within him; but now those visions of the unseen which came quite unbidden and which he could not control showed him again and again the smooth-skinned, well-formed face with the blue, brave eyes under thoughtful brows, and the slender, rounded figure of the girl whom he knew as Cynthia Gail. And whereas previously he had merely included her among the many in peril, now dismay for her particularly throbbed through him.
Her words when they last were together—"A score or so of you felt you had to do the fighting for a hundred million of us; but you haven't now, for we're coming; a good many of us are here"—no longer seemed a mere appeal to him to spare himself; it told him that she was among those on the ground endeavoring to govern the fate of this day.
He sighted, before and below, a road where German guns were being rushed forward; dove down upon them, leading his flight again and bombed the guns, machine-gunned the artillerymen; he bombed a supply train of motor lorries; he flew over and machine-gunned two motor cars with German officers and saw one of the cars overturn. But German combat pilots were appearing in force all about; Gerry gazed up and saw a big, black-crossed two-seater accompanied by two single-seaters maneuvering to dive down upon him.
He swerved off, therefore, and fled. For a moment he longed for his swift-darting little Spad instead of this heavier ship which bore bombs in addition to machine guns. But the Spads of his comrades and English combat machines appeared; and the German pilots above did not dare to dive. They circled, awaiting reinforcement which swiftly came—triplane Fokkers mostly, Gerry thought. As he watched them, he forgot all about the ground; for the French and the English pilots, ten thousand feet above him, were starting an attack. He circled and climbed a few thousand feet; he knew that with his heavy raiding machine, he could not join that battle. But heavy German airplanes—for observation, for photographic work, or to guide the advancing German guns—were appearing in the lower levels and slipping forward under the protection of the Fokkers and the Albatrosses. Gerry went for one of these and turned it back; he went for another—a two-seater—and he saw the German machine gunner fall forward; he saw the pilot's hooded head drop; he saw flame flash from the gasoline tank; the two-seater tumbled and went down.
He dared not follow it with his eyes even for the short seconds of its fall; machines from the battle above were coming down where he was. A Fokker dropped, turning over and over to escape a Spad which came down on its tail and got it anyway; now a Spad streaked past in flame. A two-seater—a German machine marked by the big black crosses under its wings—glided slowly down in a volplane. Gerry circled up to it, approaching from the side with the lanyard of his machine guns ready; but the German pilot raised an arm to signal helplessness. His gunner was dead across his guns; his engine was gone; he had kept control enough only to glide; and he was gliding, Gerry saw, with the sun on his right. That meant he was making for German-held ground. He came beside the gliding two-seater, therefore, and signaled to the west. The German obeyed and, while Gerry followed, he glided to the field in the west and landed.
Gerry came down beside him and took the pilot prisoner; together they lifted the body of the German observer from his seat and laid him on the ground. Gerry possessed himself of the German's maps and papers.
The German pilot, who was about Gerry's own age, had been a little dazed from the fight in the sky; but Gerry discovered that his willingness to surrender and the fact that he had made no attempt to destroy his own machine upon landing was from belief that they had come down upon ground already gained by the Germans. Whether or not that was true, at least it appeared to be ground already abandoned by the English. Certainly no considerable English force existed between that position and the Germans whom Gerry had seen advancing two miles away. No batteries were in action nearby; the airplanes seemed to be standing in an oasis of battle. There was a road a couple of hundred yards to the south, and, seeing travel upon it, Gerry took his prisoner in that direction.
He found refugees upon the road—patient, pitiful families of French peasants in flight, aiding one another and bearing poor bundles of their most precious possessions. The sight brought Gerry back to his first days of the war and to the feelings of the boy he had been in August, 1914, when he rushed across the channel from England to offer himself to the Red Cross in France and when he met the first refugees fleeing before von Klück's army out of Belgium and Normandy. He had seen nothing like this in France since then; and the years of war had not calloused him to these consequences. Indeed, they had brought to him more terrible realizations than the horror-struck boy of 1914 had been able to imagine. So these again were to be visited upon France! And because his people had watched for almost three years, had kept safely out!
His prisoner now turned to Gerry and spoke to him in French.
"It appears," he corrected the error he had made when Gerry had taken him, "that you are not my prisoner yet."
"No," Gerry said. "Not yet."
A Ford truck passed the farm wains and the miserable column of marchers. The driver, Gerry saw, was in khaki and was a girl. She observed him and drew up.
"Hello," she hailed alertly, taking in the situation at a glance. "Do you want to get rid of your prisoner?"
She was American—one of those "awfully good" girls of whom the English had told him! And, seeing her and hearing her voice, he knew what the English pilot had meant; and a bit of pride—tingling, burning pride for his people—flared up where the moment before had been only condemnation and despair. For this girl was no mere driver; she was in charge of the French—a cool, clear-headed competent commander of these foreign peasants from a village evacuated under her direction. She had, lying in the hay upon the floor of the truck, children injured by shell fire and English wounded whom she had found by the road. She had been under fire; and, as soon as she could get these people a little farther to the rear, she was going back under fire to guide away more people. She was entirely unheroic about it; why, that was the best thing she could do this day. Did he know something better for her to do?
"No," Gerry said. "Are there many more American girls here?" he asked, gazing toward the German advance.
"We're each—or two of us together are taking a village to get the people out," the girl said; and she named, at Gerry's request, some of the girls and some of the villages.
"Do you know Cynthia Gail?" he asked.
"She was going back, the last I heard of her, to Mirevaux."
Gerry jerked. "Mirevaux must be taken now."
"I heard guns that way. That's all I know," the girl said. She raced her engine; Gerry knew she must go on. He left his prisoner in charge of a wounded English soldier who was able to walk and he returned to the machines in the middle of the field. The captured German airplane was too damaged to remove; so he set it afire and mounted in his own.
The battle in the sky had moved off somewhere else long ago; neither in the air nor upon the ground was there engagement near him. He was without bombs but he still had machine-gun ammunition; he directed his course as he rose into the air toward the hamlet of Mirevaux.
He could see it clearly from a few hundred feet in the sky—see shells, which must be from German guns, smashing on a hillside on the south and shells, which must be from an English battery, breaking about Mirevaux. These told that the Germans indeed were in the village and some force of English were maintaining themselves on the hill. He observed a road west of Mirevaux upon which appeared such a procession as that to which he had entrusted his prisoner. The English position, which the Germans were shelling, flanked this road and partially protected it; but Gerry could observe strong detachments, which must be German patrols, working about the English to the northwest and toward the road.
The English could not see them; nor could the refugees on the road catch sight of them. Gerry sighted a small, black motor car moving with the processions. Another American girl was driving that, probably; or at least an American girl was somewhere down there—a girl with even, blue eyes which looked honestly and thoughtfully into one's, a girl with glorious hair which one liked to watch in the sunlight and which tempted one to touch it, a girl with soft, round little shoulders which he had grasped, a girl who had gone into the sea for him, and whom he had carried, warm in his arms.
A couple of German 77s began puffing shrapnel up about Gerry; for he was flying low and toward them. But he went lower and nearer and directly at that patrol. Gerry could see that they were working nearer the road, with plenty of time to intercept that procession from Mirevaux; and, though he gave those German guns a perfect target for a few seconds, he dove down upon the patrol. They were Jaegers, he thought, as he began to machine-gun them—the sort whom the Germans liked to put in their advance parties and who had made their first record in Belgium. Gerry thought of those Jaegers, with the blood fury of battle hot on them, intercepting that blue-eyed girl; and when he had overflown them, he swung back and gave it to them again.
One of the machine guns which had been firing at him from the ground or some of the shrapnel from the German 77s had got him, now; for his ship was drooping on the left; the wings had lost their lift. When he had overflown the patrol the second time and tried to turn back, he could not get around; his controls failed. The best he could do was to half pull up into the wind and, picking a fairly flat place below, to come down crashing that drooping left wing, crashing the undercarriage, crashing struts and spars and tangling himself in wires and bracing cables but missing, somehow, being hurled upon the engine. He was alive and not very much hurt, though enmeshed helplessly in the maze of the wreck; and the German gunners of the 77s either guessed he might be alive or it was their habit to make sure of every allied airplane which crashed within range, for a shell smashed thirty yards up the slope beyond him.
Gerry, unable to extricate himself, crouched below the engine and the sheathing of the fuselage; a second shell smashed closer; a third followed. Gerry felt blood flowing inside his clothes and he knew that he had been hit. But now the German gunner was satisfied or had other targets for his shells; at any rate, the shells ceased. Gerry was about a mile away from the gun, he figured; he had flown perhaps half a mile beyond the Jaeger patrols when he came down. The road, upon which he had seen the travel, ran just on the other side of a slope upon which he lay; he could see a stretch of it before it passed behind the rise of ground and he noticed a black motor car—possibly the same which he had seen from overhead a few minutes before—drive toward him. He saw the car halt and a khaki-clad figure get down from the driver's seat; it was a skirted figure and small beside the car; it was a girl!
The German gunner, who had been giving Gerry attention, also saw the car; and, evidently, he had the range of that visible stretch of the road. A shell smashed close; and Gerry saw the girl leap back to her seat and run the car on while a second shell followed it. The rise hid the car from Gerry and, also, from the German gunners, for again the shelling shifted.
The next shell smashed on the other side of the slope where the road again came into sight; the car had not yet reached that part of the road, so Gerry knew that the German artillerymen were merely "registering" the road to be ready when the car should run into the open. But the car did not appear; instead, the girl crept about the side of the slope and advanced toward Gerry. She had lost her hat and the sun glowed and glinted upon glorious yellow hair. The pointer of the 77 did not see her or he disregarded her while he waited for the car to appear on the registered stretch of the road; but a machine gunner with the Jaegers got sight and opened upon the slope. Gerry could see the spurt of the bullets in the dry dust of the planted field; the girl instantly recognized she was fired at and she sprang sidewise and came forward.
"Go back!" Gerry called. "Keep away!"
She stumbled and rolled and Gerry gasped, sure that she was hit; but she regained her feet instantly and, crouching, ran in behind him. Her hands—those slender, soft but strong little hands which he had first touched in Mrs. Corliss' conservatory weeks ago—grasped him and held him.
"Keep down," Gerry begged of her. "Keep down behind the engine!"
"You!" she murmured to him. "I thought when I saw you in the air and when you fought them so, that it might be you! Where are you hurt; oh, how much?"
"Not much; I don't know where, exactly. Keep down behind the engine, Cynthia!"
She was not hurt at all, he saw; and though the tangle of wires enmeshed his legs, he was able to turn about and seize her and press her down lower. For the machine gunner was spraying the wreck of the airplane now. She was working with her strong little hands, trying to untwist and unloop the wires to get him free when Gerry heard the motor noises of an airplane, descending. He gazed up and saw a German machine swooping a thousand feet above the ground. The pilot passed over them and, diving, came back five hundred feet lower; he took another look, circled and returned barely a hundred yards up. This time he would fire, Gerry knew; and it was impossible to find shield at the same time against the flying machine gun and the gun of the Jaegers. Gerry dragged his automatic from his holster and aimed, not with any hope of hitting the German machine, but merely to fire back when fired upon. But he could not twist himself far enough.
"Give me the pistol," he heard Cynthia say; and, as the German flyer came upon them with his machine gun jetting, he let her hand take the pistol; and while he lay enmeshed, helpless, he heard her firing.
The machine-gun bullets from above splattered past them; the pilot had overflown. The girl had emptied the magazine of Gerry's pistol and she demanded of him more cartridges. He took his pistol; reloaded it and now, when she reclaimed it, she crouched beside him and shot through a wooden strut and the wires which had been locking his legs in the wreckage. He pulled himself free.
"Now let's get out of here!" he bid.
"You're all right?" she asked.
He was testing his legs. "All right," he assured.
The Jaeger machine gunner had interrupted his fire; and the airplane, which had attacked, was far away at this moment.
"I heard you were about here, Cynthia," Gerry said. "That's why—when I had the chance—I came this way."
She made no reply as she watched the road to the rear upon which the refugees were appearing. A shell burst before them.
"I have to go to them!" Ruth cried.
"They'll scatter; see; they're doing it!" Gerry said, as the French ran separately through the fields till the rise of ground guarded them. "But we'd better skip now!"
He had removed his maps from his machine; warning her, he lit a match and ignited the wreckage. The flame, bursting from the gasoline, fed upon the varnished wing fabric, clouding up dense and heavy smoke which drifted with the breeze and screened them as they arose and, crouching, ran. The German machine gunner evidently looked upon the fire as the result of his shots and suspected no flight behind the smoke. The flyer, who had attacked, likewise seemed to see the fire as the result of his bullets. He turned away to other targets.
Gerry got Ruth, unhurt, to the crest of the slope; they slipped over it and for the moment were safe. The car which Ruth had driven stood in the road.