OVER THE ENEMY'S LINES AT NIGHT
The report Captain Raphael Dexter brought Sanderson, that Belinda was
missing from the hospital unit, at first benumbed the young aviator's
mind. He could scarcely believe it; yet the Yankee shipmaster's
insistence could not be denied.
Frank finally was assured that the captain had undoubtedly obtained
correct information. The tragedy was a fact.
For tragic the happening was, Sanderson had every reason to believe.
A girl left behind in the abandoned hospital station at the mercy of
the Prussians! Tales of their treatment of helpless women were not
unsubstantiated.
The horror and despair that seized upon the aviator shook Captain
Dexter.
"By Hannah, boy! don't take on so," he, alone with Frank in his
quarters, urged. "I didn't suspect that there was so much betwixt you
and the girl."
"There isn't," Sanderson declared. "There's nothing between us. But I
love her, Captain Dexter," and the confession was wrung from the young
man in his agony of spirit. "It's my misfortune, too, to be tangled up
in a way that ought to keep me from asking her even to _think_ of me."
"Do tell!" murmured Captain Dexter anxiously. "Mixed up with another
woman, are you? By Hannah! I wouldn't have thought it."
Frank did not hear this. His mind was fixed upon Belinda and her peril.
"We must do something," he said, recovering in a measure his calmness.
"Her position as a Red Cross nurse should assist her. There must be
some way of communicating with her--some means of inquiry."
"By Hannah! I'm not goin' back to that aunt of hers without knowin'
what's become of the girl. Let me tell you, that Mam'selle Roberta
isn't the woman for a man to try to bamfoozle. She's as sharp as can
be. By Hannah! I wouldn't darest go back to Paris without takin'
Belinda with me or knowin' that she was all right and safe."
Frank Sanderson's anxiety, based on something deeper than this, led him
to "raise heaven and earth," as Captain Dexter suggested, to obtain
news of the missing nurse. Although communication, even official
communication, between the opposing armies is more infrequent in
this war than in any other modern struggle, through influence at the
army corps headquarters and because of his record and that he was an
American, rules were set aside and a direct request for information
regarding Belinda was made to the German staff commander.
Several days elapsed before the reply reached Sanderson and Captain
Dexter, and this reply was both discouraging and terrifying to the two
Americans. No nurse or other person by the name of Melnotte had been
found at the abandoned French hospital station when it was taken over
for the German army. Nor was there any record of a person by that name
found within the district.
"Something has happened to her--something serious," the young aviator
said. "I am sorry she ever came over here. She had no right to risk her
life on these battlefields."
"Perhaps she had more right than you have to risk yours," the captain
interposed, sharply scrutinizing his young friend's countenance. "At
least, she is independent in her domestic relations. She has nobody
nearer to her than Mam'selle Roberta."
"But to throw herself away for strangers! They are not even her own
people, these French."
"You are doing your bit for them, just the same," Captain Dexter again
reminded him.
"Ah, my case is different," Sanderson declared. "I felt that some of us
Americans should do something for France--if only in gratitude. And why
not I?"
"And why not Belinda?" returned the old shipmaster with sadness. "Ah,
my boy, this enthusiasm and recklessness--it burns up youth! Better
we old fellows to give our lives than the young. But, by Hannah!" he
added, with disgust, "they refuse to use us. Want to put us on the
shelf. Lay us by in drydock. Why, my three darters----"
"I know, Captain," interrupted Sanderson, foreseeing a long monologue
if once the Yankee shipmaster got well into this theme. "But what can
we do about finding Miss Melnotte?"
Every time they came around to that question it looked like facing a
blank wall. Belinda was inside the enemy's lines--where and in what
circumstances they could not imagine. They were not even sure that she
still lived.
Nor was Sanderson's anxiety for Belinda the greater because he
remained idle or took no chances himself during these stormy days. No
twenty-four hours passed in which he did not flirt with death.
While the Nieuport he was using was being repaired, he requested work
in the bombarding squadron and sailed back of the enemy's lines on two
nights for the purpose of cutting railroad communication to the German
front.
With their usual thoroughness and efficiency the enemy was thrusting a
railroad line along the wedge they had driven into the French front.
They assumed that they had gained another bit of France and would
remain fixed there.
On the first night the bombardment was unsuccessful. Sanderson had been
on several such errands before, but usually as a pilot of a guarding
battleplane. The actual dropping of the bombs became his duty on this
occasion, and likewise upon the following night.
He left Captain Dexter fuming and fussing at the aviation quarters
because he could not go with the flying squadron. The shipmaster had
actually learned a good bit about aviation and only his age kept him
from volunteering for work at the front as a pilot.
Indeed, his age had not deterred him from volunteering, only it had
caused the authorities to refuse his services. When Mademoiselle
Roberta Melnotte heard of his attempt to enlist in the Flying Corps she
was vastly perturbed. She was almost ready to put on her hat and rush
to the authorities to oppose his enlistment, believing that he surely
would be accepted.
"He is a so-brave man, that Monsieur le Capitaine Dexter," she
explained to a friend in the American embassy. "He has the spirit of a
boy. He has already learned--_ma foi!_--to pilot an aeroplane. Next, I
suppose, he will seek to be commander of a submarine. He declares he
did not promise his three daughters, Mesdames Prudence, Patience and
Penelope, not to sail either in the air or beneath the sea."
Captain Dexter had presented two fully equipped aeroplanes to the
Lafayette Escadrille, and they would soon be shipped to the front.
Frank Sanderson was to pilot one of them when it arrived. He was now,
however, engaged with the bombarding unit and was bomb-dropper on a
machine the night that the attack upon the railroad line behind the
German battlefront was successful.
A man named Lefevre, an American, was with Sanderson and drove the
airplane. They got a flash signal from the captain of the squadron
about two o'clock in the morning that the railroad line had been found.
Having been flying high, they descended quickly, and, the night being
dark with a haze overhead that quite hid the stars, the pilot had to
depend almost entirely upon the indicating barometer for a knowledge of
their height above the ground.
"We're getting close to it, Lefevre, I believe," Sanderson urged. "I've
the feel of the ground in me. This wind has blown over a swamp--I can
smell it."
"Must be we're in a hollow between hills, then," rejoined the pilot.
"Look at the barom," and he flashed a tiny spark of light upon the face
of the altimetre.
"Go easy, then----"
At the moment there spread a sudden rosy glow directly below them.
Both aviators thought they were over an exploding shell, although the
vicinity had seemed altogether quiet.
There followed no explosion and the light winked out immediately. The
roaring motor of the aeroplane drowned ordinary sounds, but Sanderson
made his solution of the mystery plain to his mate.
"It's below us--the railroad bed. That's a locomotive. The fireman
opened the draft and the flames shot out of the stack. Quick! We'll
have to risk it! I'll put a bomb down that stack, if I have luck."
The aeroplane swooped. The bark of an anti-aircraft gun sounded above
the noise of their motor. The train was an armored troop train bound
for the front and the motor of the swooping aeroplane had been heard.
The flash of the shot, however, gave the pilot the course of the train.
"The gun, Sandy!" shouted Lefevre. "I got a flash at the road. It's
straight. We can rake every car. Surer than the bombs."
The advice seemed good. The explosions of the German gun fixed on the
roof of a forward car was a decided help to the attacking airplane.
Lefevre drove only a few yards above the ground and parallel with the
flying train. The aviators were taking a great risk, for a pole or
other obstruction might wreck them at any moment. But the opportunity
to do serious damage to the enemy was not to be neglected. Sanderson
turned the crank of the mitrailleuse, raking the train from the rear
car to the locomotive as their aeroplane passed.
The rain of bullets did fearful havoc, even destroying the gun-crew on
the car-roof, the Americans being untouched. But the train rolled on
and the machine gun fouled.
Lefevre had driven so swiftly that they were now up with the
locomotive. Unhooking his belt, Sanderson threw himself to the end of
the seat nearest the thundering train, and with his automatic pistol
shot both the engineer and the fireman, as well as the armed guard on
the tender-tank.
The train ran wild as the airplane soared upward again. A few hundred
yards further on there was a sharp curve in the road and Lefevre had
caught sight of it in time by the dim beam of the locomotive headlight.
The locomotive and every car left the rails at that curve and piled up
in the ditch.
The horror of this wreck, the effect of their bombardment, shook Frank
Sanderson more than he would have been willing to own.
This was war, and he had volunteered for just such work. But it was the
first time he had ever seen such a holocaust.
As they mounted higher in the aeroplane he saw flames leaping from the
wreck. The loss of life would be fearful. He sickened at the thought of
how this incident and others like it were multiplied every day along
the battlefront.
Their work was not done for the night, although they were headed south
once more. Until the last bomb they carried was dropped Lefevre did not
rise to a proper height for rapid flying.
They had lost the other members of the squadron while chasing the troop
train, and winged their way back alone over the German lines, flying so
high at last that, in the gray dawn, they were not seen by the watchful
German airmen.
As they neared their camp and Lefevre was about to spiral down for the
landing, Sanderson looked out to see if everything was in good order.
He was amazed to glimpse an object caught in the running-gear of the
airplane.
At first he could not imagine what it was. Then, with a shock that
chilled the blood in his veins, he saw that it was an unexploded bomb.
Unreleased before the aeroplane descended, in all likelihood there
would be nothing to mark their landing place but a deep crater in the
earth.
The situation appalled him. Already the aircraft was descending. Not
only their own lives, but those of others, would be sacrificed if the
bomb exploded when they landed.