A TERRIBLE BALLOON TRIP.

Lake County Press, Issue 2138, 4 October 1906, Page 7

A TERRIBLE BALLOON TRIP.

: BLOWN ACROSS THE BALTIC. 1 Two Gorman soldiers have just hod the most thrilling balloon trip ever recorded. It certainly bent, anything , that has ever been given to the world as fiction. The men in question were | Privates Goergen and Pelp, who were I serving in the Ballooning Battalion. They received instructions to make an experimental trip in the new mililary balloon Ibis, and at midday on | the date on which they received those ! instructions they ascended from the i military balloon station at Tegel, near Berlin, The balloon promptly took a northerly direction, soon disJ appeared above the clouds, and sailed steadily with the wind until five ! o'clock in the afternoon, when the two men considering ihat the experi- ; mental flight had lasted quite long enough, decided to descend. When they got. below the clouds, I however, they found i<> their horror | that they had left Germany behind | them, and were over the Baltic, and, to make matters worse, the balloon continued to sink. The men gradually i threw out all the ballast, but contrary winds had arisen, and the balI loon remained an hour at a height of : 800 ft. above the water level. Then darkness came on, and distances could •no longer bo judged, j but the two men heard only too distinctly the breaking of the waves of the choppy sea beneath them. They now realised that desperate efforts must be made to save their lives. They threw every unnecessary article overboard, detached the heavy towing rope and coverings of the car, but all to no avail. The men then threw oIT their hoots, coats, their braces, and their stockings, and even emptied their pockets; but nevertheless, the balloon was driven lower and lower by the gale. Nothing remained but to sacrifice the enr, and with difficulty two of the cord.-; attaching it to the balloon were severed. Then the men climbed into the network ot the balloon, and heard the dragging car dashed by the i tops of the waves, and not a moment j too soon succeeded in severing t lie rcl niaining two cords. They at once rose and were driven a considerable distance bv the storm; | then fell again and, as the very last I resource, the brave men flung away their instruments, their charts, their belts, and their side-arms, and the balloon slowly rose once more. A quarter of an hour later they heard the barking of a dog, and knew they were saved. They opened the ventilators and sank on to some tree tops.

It was now one o'clock on the Sunday morning : they had been seven hours over- the stormy water-, driven by winds which reached the force of a gale, blinded with snow, and halffrozen with cold. They waited, wrap-

tin- first signs of dawn, and then th.'.v had to walk two hours barefooted in deep snow before that found a human habitation.

In a lonel.v cottage they were hospitably looked alter, and learned they, were in Sweden, near C'arlskrone With the aid of the German Consul at the latter place the intrepid travellers soon had the remains of their balloon packed up, and n day or so

biter were safelv bark in Berlin