When our Aviator Boys had been crowded into small space aboard the
German seaplane, the big flyer cut through the mist at top speed. The
capture of the young airmen had been but an incident; an accident,
indeed. The German aviators were playing a bigger game. The boys heard
the man called Franz jesting with his comrades about something that
was going to spit fire like a volcano upon the English. Henri, in soft
aside tones, let Billy know what it was all about, for Billy was as
short in German as he was in the French language.
The seaplane gunner (they called him Joseph), when the machine soared
above the mist line, kept a sharp lookout through field glasses for
some expected coming over the sea.
The boys could see, now that it was clearing to the north, the familiar
trend of the English coast.
“They’re up to something, that’s sure,” whispered Henri to Billy; “but
what it is I haven’t the least idea.”
“I don’t see any bombs in this craft, so it can’t be anything like a
blow-up from above,” was Billy’s whispered reply.
“Hold your mouths,” growled the giant pilot.
Henri put a warning finger on his lips, glancing at Billy.
Gunner Joseph had evidently sighted the something for which he had
been looking, for he made a rapid motion with a hand behind him, which
the pilot evidently understood, for he immediately changed the direct
northerly course of the seaplane sharply to the northeast.
Now visible to the naked eye was a fleet of cruisers, under full head
of steam, and as they swiftly approached, the black cross in the
flapping colors proclaimed the Kaiser’s warships.
Billy and Henri were astounded at the sight. A German fleet within easy
shelling distance of the Yorkshire coast!
One of the cruisers turned broadside, and from the armored hull
belched smoke and flame. Looking down upon the town of Hartlepool,
the boys saw buildings crumple like houses of cards before a gale.
Other vessels of the war fleet followed the leader in broadsides, and
every iron cast seemed to find a mark and exacted toll of death and
destruction. The Hartlepools, Whitby, and Scarborough, places well
known to the captive aviators, were under galling fire for an hour.
“They’re shooting a mile, but look how true they get the range,”
remarked Billy in Henri’s nearest ear.
“Look!” Henri pointed to the land batteries, now spouting fiery
responses.
The German fleet was speeding northward--the hovering seaplane giving
signal that the British patrolling squadron was hastening to cut
off the invading vessels. Now favored by the gathering mist in the
northerly flight, the daring raiders made their escape, but it could be
seen that one of the lighter cruisers was afire. The land batteries had
evidently scored a target or two.
A guttural command from the man in the sea-plane’s bow, and the machine
was set in the wake of the fleet, and with full power in the motors.
“How much of the oil feed have we?”
The gunner’s question was passed back from mouth to mouth to the engine
man, for in the noises of the high speed nothing else could be heard
beyond a foot or two.
“Hundred miles or so,” was the answer of the engine man, passed forward.
“And nearly four hundred miles to Kiel,” muttered the gunner. “But the
fleet will put us right,” he satisfied himself.
So they were bound for Kiel, and the boys did not know it until the
seaplane settled among the German cruisers churning the waves in their
race for home. With tanks refilled, the aircraft led the flight to
Helgoland Bay.
While far in advance of the warships, the sea-plane drew the fire of
an English submarine that suddenly rose from the depths of the sea. A
figure jumped from the turret of the underwater craft, turned a lever,
and the gun that was folded into the back of the submarine swung muzzle
upward. Once, twice, thrice, the gun cracked, but every shot a miss.
The third shot, however, was a near one, for Billy and Henri,
interested spectators from the steel gallery, heard the ball hiss in
the passing.
The lookout man of the seaplane trailed a signal to the fleet, but the
submarine had disappeared before the cruisers had warily crossed the
danger spot indicated by the seaplane.
“It would have been good-by if we had caught that solid shot in the
business section of this ship,” was Billy’s essay to the stolid pilot
in front of him.
If the pilot heard or understood, he did not condescend to answer.
Some forty miles from the German naval stations in the neighborhood of
Helgoland, the sea-plane’s own gun was swiveled in the direction of a
darting aëroplane scouting from some English warship, on the watch in
these waters, but when the machine guns on one of the German cruisers,
adapted to high-angle fire, broke loose on the British machine, it
turned tail at a speed of seventy miles an hour.
Franz appeared to be greatly amused at this, and started a rapid flow
of German humor about the high-dodging machines made somewhere else
than in Germany.
Henri did not tell Billy what all the fun was about, for fear of
bringing Billy to his feet with an argument as to where the best flying
machines were made. But it would not have made any difference, for
Franz and Billy were both assured of personal peace, in that neither
could understand the other, though they talked until doomsday.
The boys had no fixed idea as to what fate had in store for them on
German soil.
“I do hope that it won’t be a military fortress for us,” said Henri.
“It would be mighty rough luck to be locked up at Cologne, or some
other jail of a place.”
“But you remember the pilot said when we were caught that they might
find a place for us in the aviation service.”
Billy found comfort in that memory.
“If I couldn’t have anything else to do but carry oil around a hangar,”
asserted Henri, “it would sure be away ahead of looking at the stone
walls of a fortress.”
It was a happy moment, then, for our Aviator Boys when at Helgoland
they were told by the giant pilot of the seaplane, whose name proved to
be Carl, that they were booked, not now for Kiel, but Hamburg, which
was the center of great aircraft activity.
“No dungeon deep for us,” sang Billy, as he executed a clog step on the
deck of the boat that later was taking them up the great river Elbe to
one of the most remarkable cities of Germany.
“An aircraft town for sure,” cried Henri, when, with Carl as kindly
captor and guide, Billy and himself fared forth from the docks into the
streets of Hamburg.
In an hour the boys saw eleven sheds, each said to contain a Zeppelin,
and at the air camp all manner and makes of aëroplanes were housed.
It was here that Carl presented his charges to Heinrich Hume, aviation
lieutenant, who conducted the new recruits to a mammoth canvas house,
where both aëroplanes and aëroplanists rest, when there is a chance to
rest.
Billy had another pleasurable shock when Lieutenant Hume, in good old
English, abruptly told Henri and himself to shake themselves out of
their blue flannel outfits, and dive into a big camp chest filled with
clothing of the lead color.
“Don’t mind the blue,” advised the lieutenant, “but it doesn’t mate
with the other moving pictures here.”
“We don’t have to be sworn in, or anything like that?” anxiously
inquired Billy.
“You’re more likely to be sworn at than in,” laughed the lieutenant.
“Now to the point: Do you know enough about aëroplanes to roll one with
the right end foremost? Carl says you kids were working an armored
seaplane when they plugged you, but Carl is sometimes inclined to draw
the long bow about adventures in which he has figured.”
Billy was inclined to hump his back at this, but wisely concluded to
let action stand as the proof.
When Billy and Henri went to work among the ’planes, the apprentices
under training by Lieutenant Hume looked like the oft-quoted thirty
cents. One or two of them even looked daggers at the newcomers.
At the end of the first day of the boys’ service test, the lieutenant
said to himself:
“Carl has stumbled against the real thing, for once, at least.”