When the first light of day appeared enemy and allied airplanes both
ascended and fought for the supremacy of the air.]
“At that precise moment—and this was the first warning he had that
there were Huns about—he heard a ferocious rattle of machine gun fire,
and got a glimpse of streaking flame and smoke from the tracer bullets
whipping past him. The Huns, three of them and all fast fighting
scouts, had seen him coming, had probably watched him drop back out of
place in the flight, had kept carefully between him and the sun so that
his glances round and back had failed to spot them in the glare, and
had then dived headlong on him, firing as they came.
“They were coming down on him from astern and on his right side, or,
as the Navals would put it, on his starboard quarter, and they were
perhaps a hundred to a hundred and fifty yards off when Ricky first
looked round and saw them. His first and most natural impulse was to
get clear of the bullets that were spitting round and over him, and in
two swift motions he had opened his engine full out, thrust his nose
a little down, and was off full pelt. Promptly the three astern swung
a little, opened out as they wheeled, dropped their noses, and came
after Ricky, still a little above him, and so fairly astern that only
the center one could keep a sustained accurate fire on him. (A scout’s
gun being fixed and shooting between the blades of the propeller—gun
and engine being synchronized so as to allow the bullet to pass out as
the blade is clear of the muzzle—means that the machine itself must be
aimed at the target for the bullets to hit, and two outer machines of
the three could only so aim their machines by pointing their noses to
converge on the center one—a risky maneuver with machines traveling at
somewhere about a hundred miles an hour.)
“But the fire of that center one was too horribly close for endurance,
and Ricky knew that although his being end-on made him the smaller
target, it also made his machine the more vulnerable to a raking shot
which, piercing him fore and aft, could not well fail to hit petrol
tank, or engine, or some other vital spot. He could do nothing in the
way of shooting back, because, being a single-seater scout himself,
his two guns were trained one to shoot straight forward through the
propeller, the other, mounted on the top plane on a curved mount
allowing the gun to be grasped by the handle above him and pulled back
and down, to shoot from direct ahead to straight up? Neither could
shoot backward.
“Ricky, the first shock of his surprise over, had gauged the situation,
and, it must be admitted, it was
“DANGEROUS IF NOT DESPERATE
“He had dropped back and back from the flight, until now they were
something like a mile ahead of him. A mile, it is true, does not take
a modern machine long to cover, but then, on the other hand, neither
does an air battle take long to fight, especially with odds of three to
one. With those bullets sheeting past him and already beginning to rip
and crack through his wings, any second might see the end of Ricky. It
was no use thinking longer of running away, and even a straight-down
nose-dive offered no chance of escape, both because the Huns could
nose-dive after him and continue to keep him under fire, and because he
was well over Hunland, and the nearer he went to the ground the better
target he would make for the anti-aircraft gunners below. He must act,
and act quickly.
“A thousand feet down and a quarter of a mile away was a little patch
of cloud. Ricky swerved, dipped, and drove ‘all out’ for it. He was
into it—400 yards remember—in about the time it takes you to draw three
level quiet breaths, and had flashed through it—five or six hundred
feet across it might have been—in a couple of quick heart-beats. The
Huns followed close, and in that half-dozen seconds Ricky had something
between fifty and a hundred bullets whizzing and ripping past and
through his wings. As he leaped clear of the streaming wisps of the
cloud’s edge he threw one look behind him and pulled the joy-stick hard
in to his stomach. Instantly his machine reared and swooped up in the
loop he had decided on, up and over and round. At the first upward zoom
Ricky had pulled down the handle of his top gun and brought it into
instant action. The result was that as he shot up and over in a perfect
loop the center machine, which had been astern of him, flashed under
and straight through the stream of his bullets.
“Ricky whirled down in the curve of his loop with his gun still
shooting, but now that he had finished his loop and flattened out,
shooting up into the empty air while his enemy hurtled straight on and
slightly downward ahead of him. Instantly Ricky threw his top gun out
of action, and having now reversed positions, and having his enemy
ahead, steadied his machine to bring his bow gun sights to bear on
her. But before he could fire he saw the hostile’s left upper plane
twist upward, saw the machine spin side on, the top plane rip and flare
fiercely back and upward, the lower plane buckle and break, and the
machine turning over and over plunge down and out of his sight. One of
his bullets evidently had cut some bracing wires or stays, and the wing
had given to the strain upon it. So much Ricky just had time to think,
but immediately found himself in a fresh danger.