THE TAUBE.

Taranaki Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 144783, 13 September 1915, Page 5

THE TAUBE.

Ci. CIRCLING VULTURE. PELTED WITH RUSSIAN SHELLS. ; The following vivid sketch of the ; winter war in Poland is from the pen . of that powerful writer, Perceval : Gibbon: — Tho Taube showed small, yet delicately and strongly distinct, against the 1 Polish winter sky of tender, luminous . grey. No noise of its engine came clown to us in the battery; it was so high that it seemed almost to hover i over us, to linger in slow circles above our heads, and to eye us with the . patience and tho relish of a vulture that : lias marked down its meat. “But I don’t think he can see us,” ; said me colonel. “All this”—ho indi- , catcd the improbable-looking saplings stuck into the ground around and among tho guns—“it doesn’t look much ■ down here; but it’s good enough for an aeroplane.” The. battery—a mixed affair of four ; field-guns, a five-inch rifle and a sixjnch | howitzer —had its station in.the middle , of a thousand-acre expanse of snowfilmed fields, fiat as a table, with a I black const of piuc-forest reaching ] around it, and a road and a straggle of | village directly before it. The colonel explained to me that, for I air-scouts, it was possible to-hide the 1 guns too thoroughly. One could, for : instance, so conceal them in an impro- ■ vised grove that the,grove itself would attract attention and suspicion. What was needful was just a sprinkling of trees, powdered artistically with snow, so that from above, at two. or three thousand feet, they showed as a mere faint smear upon the earth, like a patch ot sparse bushes. The man in the Taube, from that altitude, would see his world dimly enough anyhow, a pale effect of black and white and grey; no sense in making a noticeable monument of precautions oyer guns .that were already 7 difficult to see at all. THE RUSSIAN GUNNERS. “But I don’t like tho way he’s hanging about, all the same,” said the colonel. “So I’ve telephoned down to the field battery—ah; hor that?” Away ahead of us a pale spark flashed briefly against the black background of tall woods; the voice of the gun, monstrously loud and heart-catching in that chill, windless air, followed at an interval of seconds; our eyes leaped aloft to tho far bird-shape of the Taube weaving its pattern of curves and circles above us. Below it and short of it a small white cloud sprang suddenly into existence and grew and drifted against the sky—the smoke of the bursting shrapnel shell. The aeroplane came round in a wide curve and sailed back over us. From between our guns there appeared suddenly heads of men, crawling forth from holes in tho ground—the gunners of the battery coming up from their straw-piled underground shelters to watch the game. Grey-coated; hooded in their hashliks, with the artilleryman’s curved dirk at their belfls, they crowded out, staring up with a sort.of eager sporting interest that was not without its expert quality. The Russian gunners, in point of training and intelligence, ■ are the pick of the army; there was, about them a touch of blandness and patronage, such as actors might show looking on at a play. “Watch now,” said the colonel. The wink of wan fire again, the short detonation, and its long echoes from tho walls of tho forest, and the second smoke-cloud leaped into view, above and beyond the aeroplane this time. The machine, untouched, but warned, came sliding down the air in a steep plunge, and swung to the north. • A third shell burst ahead of it, and it came round once more. There was some laughter among the gunners. Through my field-glasses the soaring shape of the Taube was visible in its actuality as a machine. The long body of battleship-grey, the back-curving sweep of the planes, the blur of the revolving propeller were plain to the eye; the glasses stripped it of its remoteness, of its quality of an .aloof sky-inhabitant, and revealed it as a mere mechanism, commonplace and hostile. As it dipped and sailed back towards us I had oven a glimpse of its occupant, a round knob of a head seen momentarily and eclipsed again as the machine came to an even keel and slipped by. One needed that glimpse to realise entirely that at the core of the thing there was a. man st all. In war one sees so much of the machinery, so much of the mere apparatus and the mess it makes of men’s, minds and bodies; one needs, if one is to understand it with any illumination, the realisation that at the heart of the complication, at the root of all murder, and ruin, there is, not an abstraction, but a man. Another shell—short again, and more easy, interested laughter from the big men who watched among the guns. “BRACKETING” AN AEROPLANE. There is a method of firing at aeroplanes —and at other , targets, bienontendu —called “bracketing,” burstingfirst a shell £hort of it, then a shell be-

yond it, then a shelly half-way between the two, and so groping in to the true range it appeared that, for all its aoubling and plunging, ; the Taubo was nowbracketed in half a dozen positions; it it climbed to get out of range a shell was ready for it; shells would haunt it whichever way it took. In that brieflyseen black knob of a head all this, no doubt, was clear : it must have realised, perhaps with panic, perhaps with the chill resignation of fatalism, that it had misjudged the situation at tho outset, staying within the zone of fire instead of soaring clear of it at once. Now there remained for it only to turn and plunge at speed through that air which the gunner had portioned out like a range. Tho machine, lower now and clearer to see, swerved^round, banking steeply, the sound of its engine, unheard till now, travelled down to us faintly in a stuttering buzz; it headed for the woods behind and above the gun which threatened it. It was tail-on to us in the battery, a mere black edge with a central blot. A shell, travelling under it. burst between us and it; the smoke of it, forming in a white puff-ball, like an heraldic cloud, obscured its right wing for some moments. The gunners swarmed forth to stare at it; under tho black rampart of the forest the gun winked again. “Heyl” the colonel shouted. The black shape of thp aeroplane seemed to dive suddenly against a splash of fire that shone aloft, broad against ■ tho dullness of the afternoon sky—and then it was no longer a shape. For the fraction of a moment one beheld it, crumpled and hurtling, seeming to be ' hurled ' backwards along the course it had come; then the smoke spread, white and. ragged, and ont of it there dropped, in a sheer fall, something largo and formless, that crashed to earth upon the iron clods half a mile ahead of the noses of our peering dumb guns. “A direct hit!” cried the. colonel. “You saw it, eh? Tho shell hadn’t burst w-hen it hit him —beautiful! I must telephone to that ” He did not finish. A voice spoke in the air, a. droning hum, that quickened at once to a loud, delirious howl. “Look out!” shouted someone, and then —“Bang!” To the right of us, 100 yards away, there sounded tho stunning roar of a great shell exploding; a Column' of black smoke leaped like a magic tree into the air;'earth and stones fell tinkling about us. “Then —he saw us, 'after all!” cried the colonel.