THE RAIDERS LAST FLIGHT.

Cromwell Argus, Volume L, Issue 2650, 8 December 1919, Page 7

THE RAIDERS LAST FLIGHT.

o OVER THE BRITISH LINES IN FRANCE. (By "PATROL.") At the Front one could see men die in full view of the greatest audience which ever watched spellbound the last moments of a fellow-being. By comparison with such audiences, the thousands who thronged Rome's IColosseum to gloat over the dying struggles of gladiator and Christian martyr are as a mere handful. I have seen men dashed to death under the fascinated gaze of anything up to half a- million fellow-mortals. For in the presence of such audiences —amid the resounding cheers of the one side, the death-like silence of the other—do airmen fall at the Front when they are shot down in flames at night.

There is something unusually peaceful about the scene of war when the moon is up. The moon is always a gentle—never a baleful —influence. When darkness has covered up the horrors of the day, the moon does not unmercifully undo the work of night. It lets the horrors be. Its s'.lver radiance, picking out a bare skeleton of ruined church or flooding a gaunt stretch of ruined ridge, only disclqses as much of the picture of Armageddon as will open men's minds to the mutability of human things—the vastness of eternity. The front line is never still. The long, low horizon sends up a ceaseless cascade of white and coloured lights against a changing background of black and orange, where the shells burst glowingly in the night sky. Yet the Front is very silent. Somewhere there is an undercurrent of sound —rumbling, unformed noises which might be thunder, but which you know to be gun-fire. Now and then a single rifle speaks—an open sound like two pieces of wood being knocked together ; or a machine-gun stutters loudly and is still. The sky is very light—a steely blue towards the horizon ; but the great arch of the firmament, spangled with stars, is black and vast.

' Now above these odd sounds of the night a new note is heard—a deep, staccato bourdon. At the sound a long pencil of light suddenly stabs the darkness ; another follows, and another, traversing majestically on across the midnight sky, searching its ways for the disturber of the night. With high, drum-like reports, the anti-aircraft batteries give tongue and little points of light appear astonishingly in the sky. And then of a sudden.the ssarchlights stop wheeling. They are focusscd on an immense St. Andrew's Cross in the sky. They are like condemning fingers! pointing to the offender; "Thou art the man !" There he is, the German raider, a silver, incandescent bird, with a great span of wing, hovering steadily in the centre of the crossed beams of light. The fire of the antiaircraft guns becomes redouble* in fury ; the vault of heaven re-echoes to their sharp, clear voice. Then the machine-guns speak. A never-ending trail -of flaming tracer bullets is spewed skywards, following one another in endless succession like the of a dredger. The quiet of the night is broken. The whole world seems to reel and reverberate, and above all these sounds the steady, challenging drone of the raider. Suddenly out of the night, on the edge of the searchlight teams, a point of light appears. The deep voice of the raider's engines is accompanied now by the higher note of a newcomer. The point of light winks frantically ; it is a British airman crying, "Leave him to me !" Then the light becomes still. The guns are silent ; the steam of flaming bullets stops on the instant. You know instinctively that every man for miles along the Front on both sides is watching the duel. The war on land is forgotten for the instant. All eyes are turned to the air. The orange flashes on the horizon are seen no more ; even the spouting Verey lights are still. It is as though the war had stopped. The gladiators of the air are in the ring, and their great audience is awaiting the issue of the fight. It happens so quickly ; it takes so \ long to describe, and the written word falls so far short of the unimagincd majesty of the denouement. For high in the air, high enough for even Army Headquarters, in thei: safe towns far behind the two front lines to see every detail of the duel, a yellow line of flaming bullet.? glides from the outer circle of darkness into the tail of the raider, shining silvery in the searchlight's rays. He turns in desperation like a ed thing, drops, twists, flics this way and that, now heading across his own front, now towards his line. But the flaming stream of bullets follows him implacably. The faint "pop-pop' of the British airman's gun is wafted down to the vast audience on the earth.

Then without warning \a very bright light appears slowly—incredibly slowly— in the sky. It is as though the German raider had very leisurely turned up a great acetylene lamp. The light grows with a fierce incandescent fire, then turns into a creeping yellov flame, which runs like lightning along the long fuselage of the enemy machine.. The silver streak thrown by the searchlight beams is swallowed up. Now the machine is wreathed in gold. It makes a complete turn in the air, and then, with an angry roar which reaches even to the cars of the listeners far below, burets into orange iiame. For an instant there is not a sound -on earth. Every eye is turned to the shy. where hangs a huge torch of orange flame dropping slowly, slowly earthwards. Its radiance is so bright that it illuminates the slowly drifting balls of smoke with which the "Archies" have ringed the raider about. It is surmounted by a tower:vg li'Jr-.r of black, greasy smoke jtiWfdlcd 1-y * myriad crimson sparks. The.* i Q the orange and black and rr:iij«-./i o e the sky new colours are added. A shower of white and green

lights appear, very luminous, very steady, against the black pillar which crowns the burning mass. It is the raider's signal-lights exploding. The spell is broken. A great noise of cheering, beginning faint and distant along the front line, and swelling into a great roar as it comes nearer, rends the air. From the muffled sentries on the fire-steps of the front trenches to the clerks in office far back, from gun-positions and headquarters of all kinds, from fieldambulances and waggon-lines, the cheer resounds, swelling on the night breeze,, as the flaming aeroplane drops slowly—oh, so slowly !—earthward.

And the Germans see it too; see in their hundreds of thousands the crew of the raider meet a terrible death in the sky, roasted alive in the air or dashed to pieces on the ground. A muffled explosion shakes the air. One of the raider's bombs has exploded. The glare of the burning wreckage deepens ; it is very near the earth mow. And then it drops in a brighter burst of flame and a great belch of smoke and clouds of sparks. It blazes fiercely for an instant. Then the remaining bombs go of! simultaneously with a loud explosion which blows the glowing fragments of the wreck skywards in rolling columns of smoke. The spectacle is at an end. The raider has been given his quietus. Already the Verey lights are spouting on the horizon again, and the undefined noises of the night are resumed.

The searchlights have broken up their cross, and now wheel majestically across the sky, stabbing the darkness with their prying fingers. and then suddenly, unexpectedly, they go out one by one, leaving the moon, which hangs low in the heavens, undisputed sway over the night. The armies have come back to earth. The soldier turns his eyes from the air and finds himself back in sap or in trench. The war on land is resumed. High above the battlefield' a tiny silver spec glistens, outlined in lights. A high, steady engine-beat resounds from the air, giving forth, one might almost think, a note of triumph. It is the victor -of the night's duel "taking his curtain."