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, light-hearted 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!