WITH A REVOLVER AT HIS HEAD.

Auckland Star, Volume XLIX, Issue 71, 23 March 1918, Page 15

WITH A REVOLVER AT HIS HEAD.

AX AIRMAN'S ADVENTURE A few months ago a short dispatch from the Western front told or how au Allied pilot, caught behind the German lines, was ! made to ascend over the British lines in a I captured Allied machine so as to take : observations free of suspicion. The story ! as told by the aviator Is given In "The | Independent," by Irving Bacheller. With } a revolver to his head, the Briton was told : what to do. " 'All right,' I answered. \ "It was a pretty clever scheme to go over i the British lines In a British 'plane, where we could fly 50 metres high, in perfect I safety, and put the batteries on a Him so i they would show up as plainly as a neck- I tie in a cabinet photograph. They had got the engine going and set their cameras. . We got in. Up went the old 'bus. I deftly damped the dog collars tight above my | knees. It was all I needed. He didn't! have a strap on bitn. You would have thought that he was gs-ng out for a ride I with his grandmother on a mill pond In a ! flat-bottomed boat. WelL he didn't know ] me—poor duffer! Any one who knows the , game ns I do could see what was going to happen to him. In his hurry be had pulled a bone. That Bocbe colonel ought ! to have warned him. Men on either side! are always ready for a big gamble to win the prises of war. but he might as well have tried to beat the shell game. I could see myself sitting there, like n man in a sprinc wagon, aud that fat duffer holding n I revolver to my ear and telling mo what to do. It was like trying to bluff the goose that lays the golden eggs. "She rose like a bird. He had told mc to go np two thousand feet and keep on | that level. Soon more signs of trouble i with their intelligence department, for w* hadn't gone a mile when there was a burst : of shrapnel just nhead and a few pieces ! of Junk rattled against my left wing. That was lucky. It gave rae an excuse for good elevation, and that was what I wanted. "We must go up or get our beaCs blown off," I said, as I began zooming. He must have agreed with mc. for iv a second there came another burst of shrapnel just below. "Three IJoche 'planes passed us. My companion waved his huudker.-hlcf, and that's all that happened. Anyhow, they know about us. We were near our lines and up eight thousand feel. He held a sheet of p:il>er before mc on which he had scribbled the words: 'High enough. Begin to -o down.' "Say. maybe we didn't. 1 side-slipped a thousaud feet and turned two somersaults and spun down a thousand feet more so quick the old 'bus groaned and creaked like a ship in a gale. It nearly broke her back. Say, I came within an ace of getting mine. " 'Did be shoot?' " 'Shoot? I should say he did, but not me—didn't have time, tie shot out of the fuselage on her second turnover like a bullet and struck a gravelbank head first near the Ypres-Comlnes Canal. I think he Is the only man I ever knew who killed and buried himself and erected his own tombstone. Everybody in the line has been to look at that one boot sticking out of the gravel. "It was tne best joke of the summer."