GERRY, when shot down over the German lines, had succeeded in making that "some sort of landing" which his comrades had reported.
There was an axiom, taught in the training camps to give confidence to cadets, which said that when a pilot once gets his wheels squarely on the ground, he will not be killed, though his machine may be badly smashed. Gerry, in his landing, had tested this axiom to its utmost; for he had had sufficient control of his ship, at the last, to put his wheels square to the ground; and though his machine was wholly wrecked, he was not killed. He was painfully shaken and battered; but so excellently was his ship planned to protect the pilot in a "crash," that he was not even seriously injured. Indeed, after the German soldiers dragged him out he was able to stand—and was quite able, so the German intelligence officers decided, to undergo an ordeal intended to make him divulge information.
This ordeal failed, as it failed with all brave men taken prisoners; and Gerry was given escort out of the zone of the armies and put upon a train for a German prison camp. With him were an American infantry lieutenant and two French officers.
The Germans held, at that time, nearly two million prisoners of war, of which upwards of twenty thousand were officers; the men and non-commissioned officers—as Gerry had heard—were distributed in more than a hundred great camps, while for the officers there were about fifty prisons scattered all over the German states. These varied in character from sanatoria, newly erected high-school buildings, hotels, and vacated factories, to ancient brick and stone fortresses housing prisoners in their dark, damp casemates. The offizier-gefangenenlager to which Gerry and his three companions finally were taken proved to be one of the old fortress castles just east of the Rhine, in the grand duchy of Hesse; its name was Villinstein, and it housed at that time about five hundred officers and officers' servants. There Gerry and his three companions were welcomed, not alone for themselves, but for the news which they brought with them; and Gerry, being an aviator, found himself particularly welcome.
"For a flyin' man we've been a-waitin', Gerry, dear," Captain O'Malley—formerly of the Irish Fusiliers—whispered and all but chanted into Gerry's ear soon after they became acquainted. All allied officer prisoners—as German official reports frequently complained—planned an escape; but some schemed more than others. And the heart, if not the soul, of the schemes of escape from Villinstein was the black-haired, dark-eyed, lighthearted Kerry man of twenty-four summers, who was back in the casemates with his fellows again after six weeks of "the solitary" in a dungeon as punishment for his last effort for liberty.
"'Tis this way," O'Malley initiated Gerry immediately into the order of those bound to break for freedom. They were standing alone at a corner of the castle, which gave view over the ground to the east. "Out there you see the first wire—'tis often charged with electricity at night to catch us if we leap over these walls. Beyond you see the second entanglement of the same persuasion; after that—nothing at all! Do you see?"
Gerry admitted vision, as though the walls below them, the guards and the two wire barriers were merest trifles.
"We've been beyond many times," the Irishman motioned, unfolding his theory of immateriality of the apparent obstacles. "Many times."
"How?" Gerry inquired.
"By burrow, mostly. Now and then in other ways; but by tunnel is most certain. 'Tis harmless amusement for us, the enemy think; so they let us dig, though they know we're doing it, till we're ready to run out. Then they halt us and claim the reward. 'Tis arranged so."
Gerry nodded. He had heard long before, from escaped prisoners, that at certain camps the Germans made little attempt to prevent tunneling until the burrows were almost completed. The German system of rewards, by some peculiar psychology of the command, gave more credit to guards for "detecting" an escape than at first Preventing it.
"This time 'twill be different!" O'Malley promised, smacking his lips.
"Why?"
"They don't know where we're burrowing."
"How many times before haven't they known?" Gerry, asked cautiously.
"Many times," O'Malley admitted. "But this time they don't. We're working at two they know about, of course; but the third—" he checked himself and looked about cautiously, then spoke more closely to Gerry's ear. "'Tis well planned now. Ye've seen the tennis court in the courtyard?"
"Certainly," Gerry said.
"Did ye note the fine new grandstand we built about it?"
He referred, obviously, to the tiers of steps, or seats, to accommodate the spectators at the match games for the championship of the camp which then were being played.
"Under the stands where they run up against the side of the canteen building," O'Malley confided, "is a fine, empty space for hiding dirt which the Huns don't yet inspect—that not yet being listed for inspection, nothing yet having happened beneath. So there we're digging the true tunnel—besides the two that everyone knows about. Now that you're here, we'll use it. We've been only awaiting—while wishing nobody any hard luck—for a flying man. For we've been beyond the wire many times," the Irishman repeated. "But now with you here, we'll go farther." And he gazed away to the east, where airplanes were circling in the clear sky.
They had risen from an airdrome about two miles distant from Villinstein, Gerry learned, where the Germans were training cadet flyers. O'Malley had managed to learn something of the arrangement of the airdrome and had observed the habits of the cadets; he had a wonderful plan by which the party of prisoners, who should use the secret tunnel to get beyond the wire, should surprise the guards at the flying field and capture an airplane. Thus Gerry began his prison life with a plot for escape.
At times he took his turn digging in the tunnel; at times he was one of the crowd of spectators upon the stand about the tennis court, who stamped and applauded loudly whenever the men working below signaled for a little noise to mask their more audible activities; at times he himself took part in the play.
Every few days groups of prisoners were permitted to take a tramp in the neighborhood under the escort of a couple of German officers. To obtain this privilege, each prisoner was required to give his parole not to attempt to escape while on these expeditions; but as the parole bound no one after the return to the fortress, the prisoners gave it. Gerry in this way obtained a good view of the surroundings of Villinstein; and in one way or another he and the other officers picked up a good deal of news which otherwise would not have reached the prison.
It was in this manner that word reached the officer prisoners at Villinstein that an American girl, who had entered Germany by way of Switzerland in an attempt to obtain military information, had been captured and had been taken to the schloss belonging to von Fallenbosch, near Mannheim, fifty miles away. It was not known whether she had been executed or whether she still was living; indeed, it was not known whether she had been tried yet; or whether she was to be tried; and her identity—except that she was an American girl—also was a mystery. That is, it was unknown to the prisoner who brought in the news and to the others to whom he told it; but it was not a mystery to Gerry. He knew that the girl was Ruth Alden—that she had gone on with her plan and been caught.
And the knowledge imbued him with furious dismay. He blamed himself as the cause of her being at the mercy of the enemy. He had seen no way past the dilemma which had confronted him in regard to her, except to make a negative report in regard to Ruth which—he had hoped—would both keep her free from trouble with the French authorities and prevent her gaining permission to leave France for Switzerland. He had learned, too late, that while he had accomplished the former end, he had failed in the latter. She had been allowed to proceed to Switzerland; then he was shot down and captured.
It had been impossible, therefore, for him to seek further information of her fate; but he had her in his mind almost constantly. When he was by himself, in such isolation as Villinstein afforded, his thoughts dwelt upon her. He liked to review, half dreamily as he sat in a corner of a casemate with a book, all his hours with her and recall—or imagine—how she looked that first time she had spoken to him. The days upon the Ribot had become, marvelously, days with her. Quite without his will—and certainly without his conscious intention—Agnes had less and less place in his recollections of the voyage. She was always there, of course; but his thought and his feelings did not of themselves restore to him hours with her. It was the same when he was talking over personal and home affairs with the men with whom he became best acquainted—with O'Malley and a Canadian captain named Lownes; when the Irishman spoke of the girl waiting for him and when Lownes—who was married—told of his wife, Gerry mentioned Ruth; and—yes—he boasted a bit of her.
"I thought," O'Malley said to him later, "that you were engaged to an English girl, the daughter of an earl or such."
Gerry colored a little. "We've been good friends; that's all, Michael; never more than that. When we happened to go to America on the same boat, our papers over there tried to make more of it; and some of their stuff reached this side."
This was true enough; but it left out of account the fact that, not long ago, Gerry had hoped himself some day to make "more of it"; and, later, he had not tried. Now, as he thought back he knew that Agnes had never loved him; and he had not loved her. This strange girl whom he had known at first as Cynthia, and then as Ruth Alden, had stirred in him not only doubts of the ideas by which he had lived; she had roused him to requirements of friendship—of love, let him admit it now—which he had not felt before. Their ride together away from Mirevaux, when he sat almost helpless and swaying at her side after she had saved his life, became to him the day of discovery of her and of himself. He could see her so clearly as her eyes blurred with tears when she told him about "1583;" and he knew that then he loved her. Their supper together at Compiègne became to him the happiest hour of his life. He had felt for her more strongly that evening of their last parting in the pension; but then the shadow of her great venture was over them.
Everything which happened somehow reminded him of her. When he was out of the prison during the walks on parole and he passed groups of German civilians and overheard their remarks about America, he thought of her. The Germans were perfectly able to understand why. France fought, and why England fought, and why Russia had fought; but why had America come in? Why was America making her tremendous effort? What was she to gain? Nothing—nothing material, that was. The enemy simply could not understand it except by imputing to America motives and aims which Gerry knew were not true. Thus from experience with the enemy he was beginning to appreciate that feeling which Ruth had possessed and tried to explain to him—feeling of the true nobility of his country. So, as he went on his walks in Germany, he was proud that his uniform marked him as an American. Prouder—yes, prouder than he could have been under any other coat!
He had intended to tell her so; but now she was taken and in the hands of the Germans! They would execute her; perhaps already they had! From such terrors there was no relief but work—work in the tunnel, by which he must escape, and then save her, or die trying.
A little more news arrived; the American girl was believed to be yet alive; that was four days ago.
"We must work faster," O'Malley enjoined after hearing this; and Gerry, who had not yet said anything about his private fears, learned that others in the camp also planned to rescue the American girl under sentence at the schloss. The camp—which in six months had not succeeded in getting one of their own number free—swore now to save the prisoner of von Fallenbosch. Such was the spirit of the offizier-gefangenenlager of Villinstein.
So Gerry told O'Malley and Lownes about Ruth Alden; and together they laid their plans. Two days later the Irishman grasped Gerry's arm tightly.
"We wait, bye, only for a moon."
"You mean the bore's finished?"
"As near as may be till the night of use. You've the almanac; when will be the moon big enough to give you light to fly?"
"Fri—no, Thursday, Mike?"
"You'll be certain, bye; you'll not spoil all by impulsiveness."
"Thursday will be all right, if it's clear, Mike."
"Then pray, bye, for a dark evening."
"And a clear night!"
"Aye; a clear night—to find Mannheim!"
And Thursday evening came, overclouded, yet with a moon behind the clouds which shone bright and clear for minutes at a time, then, obscured, left all the land in blackness.
The digging parties of the last week had placed in the tunnel enough food from the officers' packages, which arrived regularly through Switzerland, to supply three days' rations for ten men; so that night the ten descended into the tunnel. They recognized it was possible that the guards knew about the tunnel and had permitted them to enter it that night only to catch them at the other end. The test would come when taps was sounded and the German officer of the day, making his rounds of the barracks, would find ten men missing roll call.
Gerry then was lying on his face in the tunnel and passing back dirt which those in front of him excavated. Only by counting the drumming of his heart could he estimate the minutes passing, but he knew that the delay in the tunnel was longer than O'Malley had planned.
"Taps! Taps!" came the word from Lownes, at the prison end of the burrow, who had heard the German bugle blow. From forward, where O'Malley was digging, dirt kept coming back, and still more dirt. For the diggers had not dared to run the bore to the surface, nor, indeed,, near enough to the surface so that a sentinel, treading above, would break through. At best, therefore, O'Malley, who was finishing the bore, had a fair amount left to do.
"The alarm! The alarm!"
Gerry, gasping in the stifling air of the burrow, could not hear the bugle or the bells; the warning was passed to him by the man at his heels; and Gerry passed the alarm on to the heels at his head. The Germans knew now that men were missing; the camp guards were out, the police dogs let loose; sentinels would fire, without challenge, at anyone sighted outside of the barracks.
But from past the heels at Gerry's head a fresh, cool current of air was moving. He drew deep breaths, and as the heels crawled from him he thrust upon his elbows and crept after. The bore was open; O'Malley was out upon the ground. The heels ahead of Gerry altered to a hand, which reached into the burrow, caught Gerry's arm, and dragged him out. Kneeling at the edge of the hole, he thrust his arm down, caught someone, and pulled him out.
O'Malley was gone; the man whose hand had helped Gerry also had vanished. Gerry made no attempt to find or follow them as he crouched and ran; the plan was that all would scatter immediately. Machine guns were going; searchlights were sweeping the ground. Gerry fell flat when a beam swung at him, went over and caught some other poor devil. A field piece upon a platform on the edge of the camp opened upon the space a hundred yards beyond Gerry and shrapnel began smashing.
One good thing about shrapnel Gerry recognized; it spread smoke which screened the searchlight flares. Another feature was that it and the machine-gun fire was as hard on the police dogs as upon the fugitives. But that was like the Germans—when they were surprised—to let go everything at once.
Gerry jumped up and fled, taking his chances with the machine-gun bullets and with the shrapnel which burst all about at random; but he watched the searchlights and threw himself down when they threatened.
O'Malley had planned a surprise attack in force—if you can call ten unarmed men a force when attacking a German flying field. But Gerry knew that already the ten must be cut in two. Some of them probably never got out of the tunnel; the machine guns or the shrapnel surely must have accounted for one or two. He heard dogs give tongue as they were taught to do when they had caught prisoners.
The Irishman's plan, wild enough at best, had become hopeless. Gerry had offered no other plan, because he had failed to form anything less mad. But now as he lay on the ground, while a searchlight streamed steadily above him, a plan offered itself.
This came from the clouds and from the moon shining through when, as now, the clouds split and parted—from the moon whose rising and shining full O'Malley and he had awaited. They had waited for the moon to furnish them light for their night flight in a German airplane after they got the machine. They had not thought of the moon as bringing them a "ship." But now, above the rattle of the machine guns and between the smashings of the shrapnel, Gerry heard motors in the air and he knew that night-flying Hun-birds were up. For their pilots, too, had been waiting for the moon for practice.
It is all very well to talk about night flying in the dark; but Gerry knew how difficult—almost impossible—is flight in actual darkness. When he had been in training for night flying, years ago at his French training field, he had waited so many weeks for the moon that now he jeered at himself, lying flat under the searchlight beam, for a fool not to have thought of German flyers being up tonight.
They were up—six or eight of them at least. He could see their signal lights when he could not hear their motors. They had come overhead when the lights at the prison blazed out and the guns got going. The machine guns and the shrapnel fire ceased; only the searchlights glared out over the fields beyond the prison wire. The moon went under the clouds again. Gerry knew he could dodge the searchlights; but now he made no attempt whatever to flee. Instead, he crept back toward the prison, and between the beams of lights, which reached away to the south, almost parallel, and which swung back and forth slightly
Except for those lights, all was black now; and Gerry knew how those searchlight beams must tempt some German cadet making his first night flight under the clouds. Gerry had been a cadet flying at night in the darkness with clouds closing overhead. He knew how strange and terrifying was the blackness of the ground; how welcome was any light giving view of a landing place. The airdrome, with its true landing lights, was two miles to the south; but what was direction, and what was a difference of two miles to a cadet coming down through the clouds, and "feeling" in the darkness for the ground? Gerry himself only a few months before, when caught by closing clouds, had come down in a field six miles from the one he sought. Indeed, French airmen flying at night had come down in German airdromes by mistake, as Germans had come down in French.
So Gerry lay in the blackness between the searchlight beams, accusing himself for dullness in not having known. If he had seen an escape before, and seen these searchlights shooting out over the fields, he might have realized how they imitated landing lights; but he had not; and O'Malley—if he lived—would be waiting for him by the flying field. No, not O'Malley. For the Irishman's voice whispered to him gently. O'Malley dragged himself up.
"Bye, you're hit, too?"
"No; I'm all right. You?"
"'Twas bad planned, all." The Irishman took blame upon himself for the catastrophe which had befallen the others. "I doubt whether any of them"
His lips lay to Gerry's ear; but Gerry turned his head.
"You can stand and fight a minute, O'Malley?"
"Arrah! You see them coming?"
"It's overhead, O'Malley; listen. One of them's trying to get down. Maybe there's two men in it."
"What do you mean I should hear?"
"The silence," Gerry said. "One of them just shut off above us."
"I'm affecting you, bye," said O'Malley. "But I know what you mean."
The silence to which Gerry referred was only comparative; the motor was shut off in the German airplane which was trying to "get down"; but the rush of the volplane kept the airscrew thrashing audibly. The sound passed a hundred yards overhead; it increased suddenly to a roar as the pilot opened his throttle; and Gerry knew that in volplaning down, the cadet had misjudged the ground and had switched on his engine to give him power to circle about and try for the landing again.
The roar returned; throttled down; the airscrew thrashed; black-crossed wings darted through the beams of a searchlight; the pilot got his wheels on the ground and his machine was bounding. Gerry was on his feet and running after it. O'Malley followed. The airplane rolled slowly through the second pencil of light and, as the pilot stepped from his seat, Gerry charged him from behind. Gerry tackled him and knocked him down; Gerry jerked out the German's automatic pistol.
"O'Malley?" Gerry challenged the figure which struggled up.
"Bye!"
"There was only one on board. I have him. Take his pistol ammunition, his helmet, and goggles."
"I have them, bye."
"Get aboard—in the forward seat pit!"
Gerry backed to the machine himself, holding the German covered. The prisoner dodged back and moved to wreck his machine. Gerry fired and the German fell.
Gerry jumped into the pilot's pit; the engine and the airscrew the German had left just turning over; Gerry opened wide, and felt his wheels rolling; an exultation of relief and triumph, rather than definite sense, told him that he was flying. Little lights set over dials before him informed of the accustomed details by strange scales and meters—his speed, his height, his direction of flight, and the revolutions his engine was making.
He gazed below at the ground lights from which he had risen; he turned about. The machine which he had captured, like most training machines, was big and heavy; its body could be arranged for two seats or for one. O'Malley had found the other pit; and though the machine had been balanced for pilot only, the trick of flying with weight forward was easy for Gerry.
He switched on the light above the mapboard and found spread before him a large detail map of the immediate vicinity. Below was a chart of smaller scale for use in case the pilot "flew out" of the first map and was lost. But Gerry was satisfied with the one already in position. It gave him Mannheim and—he bent closer to see clearly upon the vibrating surface—the grounds and wood von Fallenbosch and also the speck of the schloss.
The feeling of boundless power, limitless recklessness to dare and do, which flight had first brought to him as a cadet years before, reclaimed him. Flight, that miraculous endowment, was his again. He passed to O'Malley the German pilot's hood; he protected his own eyes with the goggles, and, watching the ground to estimate the wind drift, he set his course by compass for Mannheim. What he was to do there he did not know; and he no longer attempted to form any plan. The event—inevitable and yet unforseeable—which had brought him this ship had taught him tonight to cease to plan. He was flying, and content to let fate guide him. Somehow he had no idea at all of how—but somehow this night he would find Ruth Alden and take her with him. Destiny—the confidence in the guidance of fate which comes to every soldier and, more than to any other, to the flying fighter of the sky—set him secure and happy in the certainty of this.
He had climbed above the clouds and was flying smoothly and serenely in the silver moonlight. He was flying solitarily, too; for if alarm had spread upon the ground to tell that escaped prisoners had taken a German machine, it had not yet communicated itself to a pilot in position to pursue. Behind him lay only the moonlight and the stars; below, the sheen of cloud tops, unearthly, divine; the sheen split and gaped in great chasms, through which the moonlight slanted down, lighting great spots of darkness separated by the glinting path of the Rhine. The river made his piloting simple; he had only to sight it when the clouds cleared, and he must follow to Mannheim.
There was a machine gun set in the nacelle before O'Malley, and Gerry saw the Irishman working with it. O'Malley pulled the trigger, firing a few trial shots, and turned back to Gerry and grinned. The noise of the motor and the airscrew prevented Gerry from communicating any plan to his comrade, even if Gerry had one, but he knew that, in whatever happened, he could count upon O'Malley's complete recklessness and instant wit.
Lights were below—most of them a bit back from the river. That would be the city of Worms; a few more miles, and Gerry must decide what he was going to do. But for the moment the sensation of freedom and of flight together continued to intoxicate him. The Rhine wavered away to the east, straightened south; ahead—far ahead—lights. There was Mannheim.
But O'Malley, in the forward seat, had turned, and, with an arm, pointed him forward and above. And far ahead, and higher, Gerry spied dancing specks which caught the moonbeams—specks set in regular order across the sky and advancing in formation. An air squadron flying north!
Below it mighty crimson flashes leaped from the ground, and through the clatter of his motor Gerry heard the detonation of tremendous, thunderous charges. Now black spots of smoke floated before the flying specks, and from the ground guns spat fiery into action—German anti-aircraft guns replying to aerial torpedoes dropped from the sky.
Others besides the officer prisoners of Villinstein and the German cadets of the nearby airdrome had waited for the moon that night. Allied pilots also had waited; and now, with the moon to favor and guide them, they had come to attack the chemical works and the munition factories of Mannheim! An allied air raid was on that night!