*Reprinted by permission of the author and of Charles Scribner's Sons.
The lights of Dunkirk slipped rearward, vibrating like a lantern at a
ship's stern. They became a vague yellow splotch, like a hazy
harvest moon; they became a dim halo, and narrowed down to an orange
pin-point, like a smoker's match in a fog. Ypres showed southward in
a pale aureole. Afar off the guns of Flanders thundered like drums.
Meriwell, as he leaned over the middle car of the dirigible, lowering
his masked head to the wind, watched the black country skim by as if
it were being pulled along by a rope. A spring wind cut past like a
hurricane, and in it Meriwell could taste the sharp tang of gunpowder
mingled with the scent of April flowers. Ypres flashed by beneath
them and Cambrai rose like a star. The noise of the artillery
discharges came nearer. It took on the heavy, booming tones of a
March sea beating hollowly on cliffs.
"We're coming near the firing-line," Meriwell said to himself. "We
ought to be rising now."
He glanced across to where the steersman stood cowled and rigid at
his wheel, his slim, tall form suggested more than defined by the
hooded electric lights. Beside him poring over compass and map, his
pale lawyer's face showing up like that of a hunting-bird, was the
navigating lieutenant. In the shadows, leaning over the edge of the
car, as a captain leans over his flying bridge, was the flight
commander, old Colonel Sanderson. Meriwell glanced surreptitiously
at his square-cut, tow-like beard and bowed engineer's shoulders.
They seemed to droop more than ever to-night.
"Poor old skipper!" Meriwell muttered sympathetically.
The guns of the firing-line crashed into the air with heavy,
shattering blasts. In the distance there showed the faint shadows of
lights. Green shadows, that were lyddite; and infinitesimal
pin-points of yellow, that were the flashes of rifles; and the pretty
orange of shrapnel; and the blinding white of magnesium flares.
"Eighteen degrees up," the navigating lieutenant ordered. He watched
his plumb-line while the steersman heaved on his switch. "Easy!
Steady! Right-o!"
The floor of the car tilted like the deck of a steamer rising to the
swell. The huge dirigible nosed her way upward like a mounting
dragon-fly. They passed through a fleece of cloud that touched them
caressingly like soft fingers. The noise of battle beneath them
faded into a vibrating bass chord. The propellers purred like giant
cats.
"She answered like a blood mare," said the navigator, pride ringing
in his voice.
"If only my guns and bombs go as well as your planes," Meriwell told
him, "I'll be satisfied."
"They will, never fear," the navigator laughed.
They were all proud of her, navigator, gunnery lieutenant, engineers,
and crew. Full-fledged, like Minerva from the head of Jove, she had
appeared from the tousled brain of the queer, misshapen Scotch
engineer of the Clyde, who had come knocking at the door of the
war-office when the slug-shaped Zeppelins were pouring fire on the
heart of London and the British airmen were relying on frail,
insufficient biplanes--sparrow-hawks competing with eagles. They
had, thank God! trusted that little man with the Scots accent and the
brier pipe, and here they had her now in the air, three hundred feet
of her, a miracle of aluminum and gas and oiled silk, rigid,
dependable, fleet as a bullet from a sharpshooter's piece. Meriwell
studied her lines through the darkness with a throb of pride: her
graceful length, like some wonderful night insect; the wide sweep of
her planes, like a jinn's wings, the shelf-like horizontal ones to
send her nosing upward like a hawk or to let her down in a gliding
sea-gull's swoop, the vertical one like the rudder of a gigantic
vessel; the three great baskets, attached to the keel with the
trellised runway between them; the four propellers, humming like a
nest of bees, two to the forward car, two to the aft; the platform
above the many-jointed aluminum-covered balloons, with its emergency
bridge and rapid-fire gun.
"We're up seven thousand feet," the navigating lieutenant grinned.
"How do you like it?"
"Don't like it at all," Meriwell answered. His teeth were chattering.
"You'll like it less in a minute. I'm going up to ten."
The din of fighting below had vanished into a faint murmur and the
flashing guns and flaming artillery had become small, flickering
lights, like fireflies on an August night. Occasionally a cloud
flicked past below them and shut off even the pinpoints of light.
Here and there a group of stars showed, coldly lustrous, while
southward toward Reims one fell sheer, like a bomb.
"I'd rather be shot than as cold as this," Meriwell grumbled.
Beneath his leather suit and woolen mask his skin had become rough as
sandpaper.
He looked about the car. The navigator stamped his feet and swung
his arms with the cold. The steersman crouched low behind the wheel.
Four of the crew huddled in blankets against the walls of the basket.
Only the commander stood imperturbable and grim, looking into the
night. The shaded electric bulbs threw a sickly yellow light over
the mechanism of the dirigible; over the black signal-board, on which
green, red, and white circles and triangles showed, messages to and
from the engineers fore and aft; over the row of switches, like those
in a railroad tower, that opened the cages beneath the cars to
release the pear-shaped bombs; over the navigator's map and compass.
They outlined dimly the machine gun that peered over each side
swathed in their oilskin coverings. They drew strange, green glints
from barometer and spirit-level, and made silver sparkles on the
frost crystals that were forming, parallelogram on parallelogram and
triangle on triangle, among the twisted riggings of the car.
"What time is it?" Meriwell asked.
"It's ten-thirty," the navigator jerked. "We'll make Mainz by two
and be back about dawn."
The cold became more dry and piercing. It seemed to ooze in at the
pores and mingle with the blood and compose itself into a mixture
that chilled flesh and bone. Meriwell felt his limbs going numb.
The countryside beneath was becoming darker. There were no longer
great chandeliers of light to show towns and small clusters that were
villages. To the left a faint geometrical array of arc lamps rose
dimly. The navigator crossed to the side of the car and looked at it
for a moment. He shook his head grimly. Meriwell knew it was
Brussels. A cloud enveloped them and dashed them with particles of
dew that were like a shower of frost. Through the thick spray the
figures of the steersman and commander loomed up gigantically, like
visitors from another world showing vaguely through a misty dawn.
There was something eerie, Meriwell thought, in the immobility of the
commander. He should have shown more eagerness, more of a sense of
satisfied ambition. For years the old engineer officer had lived in
the hope of seeing England recapture her lead in the aviation of the
world. He had worked night and day in his laboratory, testing gases,
testing metals, working out models for a battleship of the air that
would thrust aside the Zeppelin and the Schutte-Laenze as the steamer
put aside the barkentine. And now to-night he was commanding his
dream for the first time in action. He was to raid the great railway
network of Mainz, over which German corps were entraining night and
day for the last supreme effort to gain the coast towns. In two
hours he would be tearing the mighty terminal to shreds of twisted
rails and charred wood, and distorted lumps of iron that had once
been panting locomotives. Meriwell was proud to be with him, and the
commander should be proudest of all. The gunner remembered how the
old man had pleaded for the detail. The chief of staff had argued he
was too old; he was too valuable. The chief had had in mind a thing
Meriwell had forgotten and which suddenly came back to him with
stunning force. But the old aviator had won.
"The old sportsman!" Meriwell said to himself, and his throat choked
with pride; "the great old sportsman!"
He remembered how, on the first raid of the leprous-white Zeppelins
from over the channel, the first house to be struck was the house of
the old commander, a square, uncompromising, soldier-like house on
Notting Hill, where his wife--the gray-haired, motherly lady with the
dignified eyes--dwelt, and his widow daughter, mourning her husband
dead somewhere in France. His soldier son, of the Sherwood
Foresters, home on leave, was sleeping at the time. There were heard
the high whir of propellers and the desultory crashing of
anti-aircraft guns. Then, accurate as a thunderbolt, the great
pear-shaped bomb had dropped, with the crash of lightning striking a
tree. A colleague of the Royal Artillery, a blunt old fighter, with
a cropped gray moustache, had told him about it, tactfully,
laconically, with a fighter's sympathy. He told him how the
gray-haired lady had died--very dignified, as she had been in life;
very peaceful, as befitted an upright gentlewoman, her calm features
mercifully unmarked. He stumbled as he spoke of the young captain,
for a soldier should die on the battlefield, with guns roaring and
his men about him, instead of being potted like a rat in a
corn-stack. When he came to the daughter his face diffused to purple
and his gray eyes flashed.
"Curse them!" he swore viciously, "curse them night, noon, and
morning! living and dead! the rotten gallows-birds!"
"That's all right, Carter," the aviator had said. "Thank you for
telling me." And he had walked off, fumbling pitifully at his
sword-belt. What black hairs he had left had turned white since
then, and his gray eyes were more sunken, but his beard jutted
savagely since, and his voice snapped commands to his airmen with a
ring like that of steel.
"I wish we were over that railway station," said Meriwell to himself,
grimly. He squinted across at the switches of the bomb-cages and at
the silent machine guns in their oilskin swathings. "He's going to
get some good work in to-night, if I can help."
The officer at the compass straightened suddenly. He punched at the
indicator buttons in a quick burst of energy.
"Up planes," he shouted. "Nine degrees down."
"Nine down!" the steersman repeated. He heaved on his switch with a
long, graceful pull. The notches clicked successively like a clock
in winding. The car tilted forward gradually. Meriwell grasped at a
support to keep himself from sliding. Wind flew against them in a
strong upward sweep. The steersman braced to his wheel like a
wrestler. The propellers purred less loudly. Meriwell had the
sensation of being gently pulled downward. He looked over the side
of the car fearfully. A few desultory lights showed dimly, like the
lamps of a train in the distance. An engineer officer dropped into
the car from the passage, electric torch in one hand and oil-can in
the other. He reeked pungently of gasolene.
"Time you were going down," he remarked peevishly to the navigating
lieutenant in strong Scots. "Do you want all my engines to freeze?"
"It'll be hot enough pretty soon," the navigator jeered at him.
"Where are we?" Meriwell asked.
"South of Maastricht," the lieutenant answered. He was as excited as
a schoolboy. "We'll be over the border in a minute." He leaned
toward the wind-gauge. "Doing seventy-two miles an hour," he shouted
after the engineer.
It was warmer now. Meriwell glanced at the scale beside the
barometer and saw it registered two thousand five hundred feet.
Vague, clean scents stole through the wind--the white odour of
hawthorn and the freshness of spring grass and early flowers, and the
transparent odour of the wind, like the transparent taste of water.
Sounds rose vaguely into the air--the shadows of sounds, it
seemed--the baying of an uneasy dog and the twitter of startled
birds. An automobile-horn screamed raucously and somewhere there was
the cutting whistle of a train. As he leaned over the side of the
car, the gunnery lieutenant saw the sparsely lighted land slip away
beneath them as a pier slips away from a liner. Occasionally there
was a brightly lighted municipal building; occasionally a microscopic
point that Meriwell felt was a man with a lantern. Here and there a
forge licked like flames on a volcano--a mute suggestion of war in
which labour ceased neither night nor day. Afar off a flashing line
of lights, like the lighted fuse of a crude mine, showed a train
speeding. Meriwell felt himself looking at these things as a
disembodied spirit might--the last odour and sound and sight of an
earth that years of dwelling in had invested with a great affection.
He felt himself shiver.
He moved slightly against the edge of the car, and as he did he
discovered, with a sense of shock, that his hand had grasped the rail
so tightly that he could hardly move it. The horrible intent
nervousness that airmen know was lapping itself about him. He felt a
wild desire to find himself on earth again, so wild that he had to
clinch his teeth to prevent himself from jumping over the side of the
car. He was suddenly conscious of his nerves--they seemed to spread
all over his body like the veins of an ivy leaf, to be writhing, to
be crying at his finger-tips. A great fear came on him, as it might
come on a man swimming in the ocean far from sight of land or sail.
They had no right to be there, he said to himself fiercely, no right
to be high among the winds. They were intruders, impertinently
encroaching on the domain of some Power whose inalienable domain the
air was. They might irritate It, who had placed them on the earth to
walk with feet on it and not above it to fly with wings. At any
moment It might arise and smite their meagre human device of gas and
steel as a man might smash a fly on the wall. He cowered suddenly,
as if expecting a blow.
A faint exhalation of pale light showed to the northeast like a
phosphorescent cloud--Aix-la-Chapelle! So they were over the border
at last! Meriwell's teeth set and his eyes glinted. A sense of
danger seized him, and suddenly there began running in his head the
full sonorous rhythm of the "Watch upon the Rhine." They were over
the iron wall at last, over the impregnable ring of steel. In spite
of singing, in spite of all boasting--and as he felt his blood pulse
proudly another chilling terror came over him. He felt as if the
souls of all the dead fighters of the empire were rising up against
them in a vast current of wings, Saxon men and Prussian and Hessian,
soldiers of Bavaria and of Würtemberg, levies of the Hansa
towns--striking at the steel bird with ineffectual, spiritual
fingers, clinging pathetically to rigging and nacelle and plane,
gazing hatefully at the invaders with horrible bloodshot, unbodily
eyes....
The navigator turned suddenly to the man at the wheel.
"What the deuce is wrong with you?" he raged. "Starboard, I said.
Starboard!"
The steersman bent to the wheel. He tugged and pushed until the
veins stood out on his forehead like ropes.
"Can't do anything, sir," he stammered, "I'm jammed."
The navigator jumped to the signal-board. He snapped switches like
fingers cracking. He leaned into the shelter-box of the
speaking-tube.
"Cut off," he shouted, "the rudder's jammed. Engineer-lieutenant
amidships!"
The hum of the propellers died away musically. The dirigible glided
easily like a bird volplaning. There was the shuffle of feet along
the metal-latticed passage. The dour Scots lieutenant dropped into
the car, cotton waste in one hand and oil-can in the other. His
second, a bright-cheeked Suffolk lad, leaped agilely after him.
"Oil on the hinges all evaporated--with your seventy-two miles an
hour," the lieutenant snapped at the navigator. "I'll go aft and oil
up."
"I'll do that," the second urged. He caught at the oil-can and
plucked his torch from its scabbard. They heard him patter aft in
the rear car. They saw his light flicker for an instant as he swung
into the rigging. The Scotsman looked after him with an affectionate
eye.
"A fine lad!" he murmured, "and a fine nerve he has!"
As he looked over the rail of the nacelle Meriwell saw the earth
swing beneath him gently like a cradle rocking. The swaying lights
gave him a sense of dizziness. He felt suddenly that the earth was a
small thing, bowling through space like a tossed ball.
"Right!" he heard the engineer's second hail faintly.
"Right-o!" came the cheery call of the navigator. He watched the
light of the boy's torch as he crept along the rigging to the main
car. He heard him bandy a hearty word with somebody. He heard a
gruff word of caution, a laugh, and a choked scream. Meriwell sprang
to his full height and grasped the rail with both hands. He saw the
flicker of the shadow as it plunged downward.
"My God!" he blurted. "He's gone!"
The navigator rushed to the side of the car like a maniac. The
steersman half-turned from the wheel. The engineer officer stiffened
like a pointing dog.
"He's gone!" the navigator said stupidly. "Poor Conroy's gone!"
They stood a moment silent, looking at each other in white horror.
The commander came out of the shadows. He took his peaked cap off.
"God be good to a gallant officer!" he said.
"Amen!" Meriwell answered.
The engineer strode forward silently through the passage. The
commander touched the navigating officer on the arm.
"Ahead, Mr. Brennan," he said simply.
The navigator caught up his tube.
"Full ahead," he ordered. He turned to the steersman. "Southeast by
east," he directed.
"Southeast by east," the steersman repeated mechanically. The
propellers throbbed, whirred, hummed. The night air cut against them
like a whip. A lone star showed up for a moment in a break of cloud,
and then disappeared again, as a stage disappears between closing
curtains.
Meriwell felt dazed. War--this wasn't war! This was a puny fooling
with the engines of destiny, children pulling the triggers of
firearms. He remembered how a great-uncle of his had died at
Balaklava: a bright morning with the battle-drums beating; guns
pealing, soldiers cheering; Cardigan riding gallantly at the head of
the Light Brigade. _Pro patria mori_! Yes--but to fall two thousand
feet in the night-time and to strike an alien ground with a sickening
thud--that was not war. That was horror. He remembered
inconsequently how he had heard that a man would be dead before he
struck the ground and the thought consoled him somewhat.
Stollberg slipped past dreamily in a murk, Lamersdorf, Blankenheim,
Adenau and Honnigen. Carts rattled as they flashed over Dumpelfeld.
At Naub an alert sentry fired his Mauser, a whip's crack and a
bullet's futile ping. Coblenz flitted past and they were over the
Rhine, black, undulating, reflecting mistily the lamps of unsleeping
barges. They swung over Wiesbaden, and Mainz came toward them,
ambling like a man into ambush. The dirigible tilted upward at an
angle of thirty. Meriwell sprang to the centre of the car. The
commander climbed forward.
"Remember," he warned. "Not a second to waste!"
Doubt and nervousness dropped from Meriwell like a cloak. His brain
sprang into action like a boxer's muscles at the call of the gong.
He clambered forward along the passage toward the first arc. Already
the gun crew had stripped the covers from the machine guns. Men
stood alongside the rails with queer umbrella-like things in their
hands--the asbestos parachutes, with their naphtha-soaked torch in
the handle, flares that would light up every cranny in the ground
beneath and protect the dirigible from the light of the flares
themselves.
"Ready, gunner?" asked the navigating lieutenant.
"Ready," Meriwell sang back.
They swung toward the town easily as a ship comes to its pier.
Beneath them they could see the lights of the railroad station, big
violet globes that radiated like stars. Men hurried to and fro along
the concrete platforms--queer, squat, huddled figures. Two engines
fussed in and out like busy housewives. In one corner was a massed
city of railroad-cars. Rails shone in a bewildering intricacy like a
metal puzzle. Long, lank sheds showed like barns.
"Ease up," the commander ordered. He stood square in the centre of
the car, his beard jutting, his hands thrust deep in his pockets. It
was as if some main nerve had suddenly come into play, electrifying
the great steel vessel. The navigator sprang to the speaking-tube.
"Cut off," he shouted. He thrust the steersman away from the wheel
and caught at the spokes. "Figure of eight," he muttered. The
dirigible swung gracefully in a curve leftward. Meriwell looked over
the side again and raised his night-glasses. On the platforms
beneath men were running to and fro excitedly. As they looked upward
they had the appearance of a child's tin soldiers gazing fearsomely
at a human being. A whistle cut metallically into the air. A
carbine cracked. A searchlight shot skyward in a broad ribbon of
white and began casting about like a fisherman's line. Somewhere
there was a thudding boom, a whining scream, and a white star opened
like a flower three hundred yards away with a crash like wood
breaking.
"Go ahead, Mr. Meriwell," the commander directed.
Meriwell raised his megaphone to his lips.
"Overboard, the parachutes," he thundered.
There was a burst of murky, yellow flame fore and aft. Six flaming
torches floated downward like snowflakes falling. The town cowered
darkly to the rear of them. Beneath, to the right, the station
showed as if lit up by some great conflagration. Above, everything
seemed to have gone grotesquely black. Meriwell could hardly see
across the car. Another searchlight leaped in to the air and crossed
the first one. They stabbed about like the tentacles of an octopus.
The anti-aircraft guns shot six white stars to port in rapid
succession like revolver shots. Along the concrete platforms a brace
of sharpshooters dropped to their knees and cuddled their pieces to
their cheeks. The dirigible moved with easy dignity toward the
station. Meriwell calculated a moment. The bombs in the fall would
carry forward in the direction the dirigible was headed for. He
would have to wait a moment. Weights, distance, heights, flashed
through his head like the dots and dashes of a Morse code.
"Sections A and B, lanyards 3 and 4, fore and aft," he bellowed.
"Heave on!"
The dirigible shivered and jumped like a restive horse as the gunners
heaved on their switches and the weighted bombs dropped from their
cages. A searchlight caught the great hawk for a moment and showed
it gray and lustrous like a battleship at sea. The navigator swung
his wheel about with a jerk. The dirigible turned like a hare. The
propellers burst into a wild, spasmodic hum. They oscillated
dangerously. Meriwell clung onto the side and looked over.
Eight great splotches of red flame burst suddenly on the ground,
sideways, like water splashing. They showed red and angry like a
man's wound. There were dark streaks among them--earth thrown up,
men, metal, concrete. A puff of hot wind struck the car, and a vast
unspeakable noise, a maddened, crashing roar, like the earth
protesting at being attacked--a shuddering, horrible thing that
drowned the feeble crackling of the guns and seemed to blot out life
itself for a moment. The dirigible shivered like a feather in a
gully of wind.
"Ease up," he called to the navigator. "A and B, lanyards 2 and 5,
fore and aft," he roared again. Again the jump and curvet of the
car; the red cup-like explosions, the terror of sound. A gun boomed
southward, and something passed them with a high shriek. The
searchlight caught them again and hung on with the tenacity of a
bulldog. Something like a fly appeared in the west.
"Look out," the commander warned the lieutenant at the wheel. "Get
ready to rise."
Meriwell looked downward again with his glasses. The naphtha planes
were approaching the junction on their drop and were lighting up the
scene with a lurid Satanic glow. The glasses nearly slipped from his
hands. Beneath him was chaos. The glittering rails, the compact
platforms, the lank sheds, the massed cars, the violet lights were no
longer there. The terminal showed like a ploughed field--a
wilderness of stone and earth, of twisted metal and shattered wood.
Great chasms showed where the bombs had struck; little hillocks of
thrown-up earth; great iron pillars broken in two like match-wood;
huddled figures that had been soldiers on the platform; while from
the massed cars and the long sheds great waves of red and blackish
flame showed with foam tops of rolling brown smoke, rolling, licking,
crackling, roaring, like a mediæval dream of hell.
"I don't need section C," he laughed. All the havoc had been wrought
by the light bombs. There were still eight mammoth pears in their
cages, unused. He could save those.
"Get the bridge now, Mr. Meriwell," the commander instructed, "and
swing around to the forts."
"Empty ballast," roared the navigator.
There was a gurgle as the stop-cocks on the water-tanks of the keel
were opened--a hollow rushing that should have ended in a splash. In
the glaring light the water poured downward in two great streams fore
and aft like silver cables falling. The dirigible rose as if drawn
upward. Bombs burst like firecrackers. Beneath, the fire rustled
like crushed paper and exploded now and then, in queer, hollow,
inadequate sounds. The navigator swung over the river. Four
thousand feet below, the bridge showed over the black ribbon of the
Rhine like a plank over a rivulet. Meriwell watched it with the eye
of a cat ready to spring on a mouse.
"Ready on section C," he warned, "lanyards 2 and 3, fore and aft."
They floated along hazily, like a stick along a river. The
anti-aircraft guns broke into a passion of whipping reports. The
searchlights cut into the air like thrusting bayonets.
"Heave on!" he yelled suddenly.
The dirigible lifted violently like a canoe struck by a great wave.
There was a loud whirring in the air as the bombs dropped downward.
Meriwell felt his heart jump to his mouth. He peered over the edge
breathlessly, his hands gripping the rail with sudden fear.
Mechanically he opened his mouth to protect his ear-drums from the
report, and as he did a vast wave of orange flame, like discoloured
sheet lightning, seemed to flick along the river. For a moment,
soundless, the river rose in its bed as if struck by a mighty hand.
The great stone bridge disappeared as if kicked away.
"My God!" said Meriwell hoarsely, "my God!"
Then suddenly noise struck him between the shoulder-blades, noise
such as he could hardly believe possible--an infinitude of sound that
rocked him like a crashing blow, a sound as of two planets meeting in
mid-course, a gigantic forbidden thing, that only gods should make.
"The bridge is gone," said Meriwell stupidly.
A great hush swung over the town. The anti-aircraft guns stuttered
and died. The futile rifle fire stopped. The thunder of the forts
was cut off in mid-air. Only the blaze at the junction roared a
little like a forced draft. Over the river all was black. The water
had shut off the flare of the explosion. The searchlight struck the
ballonet of the dirigible as a spear strikes a fish. There was the
throb of propellers.
"Triplane to starboard," the navigator warned.
"Send him down, Mr. Meriwell," the commander ordered calmly.
"Navigator, put the men by the engines ready to start on the word."
The triplane rose jerkily in the air like a toy at the end of a
string. Its three shelf-like planes showed dimly and vaguely like a
great kite. Meriwell felt sorry for it--it was a game, chivalrous
thing, to rise in the air to give battle to the leviathan. He felt a
great throb of sympathy and sorrow for it. It looked such a puny
thing--but he mustn't let it get above him, or alongside him----
"Searchlight on starboard gun," he snapped.
A sergeant and corporal sprang to the Maxim. They clamped a thing
like an automobile-lamp to the barrel. They snapped a switch, and a
line of light shot out like a harpoon. It whipped about like a
fencer's blade, parrying, thrusting, lifting, dropping. The corporal
threw his leg over the saddle and caught the trigger.
"When you see her, fire!" Meriwell ordered.
She showed up for a moment, black and fragile, and motionless it
seemed. The gun broke into an infuriated chatter. The
cartridge-tape leaped like a hooked eel. Suddenly they saw the great
kite twist like a wounded bird. It dropped in a wavering zigzag
while two black pin-points dropped in plumb-lines.
"God help them!" Meriwell breathed.
The propellers of the dirigible plunged into their loud whir like the
first peal of an organ. Meriwell staggered and lurched. The
dirigible shot forward like a stone from a sling. The commander fell
to pacing the car nervously. His fingers cracked like castanets.
His beard twitched. He turned on the gunner.
"Never mind the forts," he shouted. "We've done enough. What have
you left?"
"Sixteen small and four large bombs," Meriwell answered.
"Get ready," he warned. He turned to the navigator. "Back and over
the town."
"Back and over the town?" the navigator queried stupidly. "Over the
town?"
"Yes," the commander barked. His face seemed queerly white and
strained. "Let them have all you've got, Mr. Meriwell."
"You don't mean--?" Meriwell nearly laughed in amazement. "Bombard
the town?"
"Yes. Quick. Circle around and let go."
A great, tawny lake of flame poured over the acreage of cars in the
junction. It lighted the town dully and they could see it hazily,
through a smoke screen, as it were. The narrow Gothic buildings
showed up as in a painting; the peaceful cathedral; the great, squat
municipal hall; the queer dolls' houses--it all seemed like a
theatrical spectacle. Southward the gunners still threw their white
stars and the artillery of the forts stabbed red and blindly into the
murky fog.
"Take the wheel," the navigator told the steersman. "Planes up
eighteen and swing in a circle." He looked at the commander with
grave, disquieted eyes.
Meriwell caught at the commander's sleeve.
"My God, sir! You can't do that!" he shouted in horror. "You can't
fire on civilians."
"I can," said the old man doggedly. "I can and I will."
"You're mad, sir! You're mad!" he babbled.
A stray shot cut screaming past them. They rocked from the current.
The crew moved about the car uneasily.
"Bring her around," the commander ordered. The navigator never moved.
A vast desire to throw himself on the old commander came on Meriwell,
to bind him hand and foot. He must have gone crazy, he judged. That
last terrific explosion had injured his brain. Then suddenly he
remembered the house on Notting Hill, the white-haired lady who had
died on the night raid, the screaming, distraught daughter, the
gallant captain of Sherwood Foresters killed like a rat in a trap.
He understood.
"I can't do it, sir," the navigator replied. Meriwell took a step
toward him. His hands went out pleadingly.
"I know, sir. I understand. But we can't do it. I won't give the
order and the men wouldn't pull the lanyards," his voice stumbled.
"We're soldiers," he continued, "and we're fighting soldiers--not
unarmed men, not sleeping children, not women."
There was a moment's silence. The wind blew about them as from a
great blast-pipe. The reports of the air-guns ceased for a moment
and began intermittently. The navigator turned his head away.
Meriwell looked at the commander's white face.
"Soldiers!" he repeated. "Clean fighters. Soldiers and gentlemen.
Officers and gentlemen, as your son was. And your wife was a
soldier's wife and your daughter was a soldier's daughter."
He waved his hand toward the town.
"We've smashed the junction and smashed the bridge. No train will
pass that way again and no ship will come up the Rhine. We've done
our work--and not a building outside injured and not a civilian
attacked. They'd be proud of that, your people, sir. You can't do
this other thing, sir. It isn't the game. It isn't cricket."
He watched the commander's face keenly. He waited until he saw the
bitter twist pass from the mouth and the frown go out of his eyes.
"They wouldn't want that," he urged. "They'd be ashamed, those
people of yours." He waited a moment. "The old code, sir, an
officer and a gentleman."
The commander's head drooped a little. The stiff poise of his grey
beard softened. His shoulders lost their tenseness suddenly.
"I--I--" he wavered. He turned to the navigator. "Right about and
back," he said weakly. He slipped into the rear among the shadows.
The navigator sprang to his compass.
"Nor'west by west," he ordered.
"Nor'west by west," the steersman repeated mechanically.
And as Meriwell leaned over the car he saw the town race flatly away
from them, while the guns still chattered viciously, like disturbed
magpies, and their charges burst high in the air into pretty,
artificial stars.
V