A CIROLING VULTURE.

Tuapeka Times, Volume XLVI, Issue 6307, 3 November 1915, Page 4

A CIROLING VULTURE.

PSLTSD 'WITH BUBSUN. SHELLS.

[The following vivid sketch of the winter war in Poland i» from the pen of that powerful wrjter, Perceval Gibbon.] ! ' The Tanbe showed small, yet delieately ami strongly distinct, against the Polish -winter sky of tender, luminous grey. No noise of its engine came down to us in the battery; it was so high that it seemed - almost to hover over us, to lingor in slow circles above our heads, and to eye us with the patience and the relish of a vulture that has marked down its meat. "But 1 don't think he can see us," said the colonel. "All this "—he indicated the improbable-looking sapplings stuck into the ground around and among , the guns—"it doesn't look much down here; but it's good enough for an aeroplane." The battery—a mixed affair of four fiald-guns, a five-inch rifle and a sixinch howitzer—had its station in the middle of a thousand-acre expanse of snow-filmed fields, flat as a table, with a black coast of pine forest reaching [■■ round it, and a road and a straggle of rillage directly before it. The Colonel explained to me that, for nil-scouts, itj was possible to hide the .guns too thoroughly. One could, for instance, so conceal them in an improvised grove that the grove itself would attract attention and suspicion. What was need,ful 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 of 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 o£ precautions over guns that wore already difficult to see. at all.

TIIE KUSSJAN GUNNERS. "But- I don't like tho way he's hanging about, all tho same," said tho Colonel, "so I'vo telephoned down to the field battery—all! hear that!" Away ahead of us a pale spark flashed briellv against the blade 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 the 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 iuto existence and grew and drifted against the sky—the smoke of the bursting shrapnel shell. The aeroplane came round in a wide curve ami sailed back over us. From between our guns there appeared suddenly heads of men, crawling forth from holes in the ground—tho gunners of the battery coining up from their straw-piled underground shelters to watch the game. Grey-coated, hooded in their bashliks, with the artilleryman's curved dirk at their belts, 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 blaudness 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 the walls of the, 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 camo round onte more. There was some laughter

itniong 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; tho 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 even a glimpse of its occupant, a round knob of a head seen momentarily and eclipsed again as tho machine came to an even keel aud slipped by. One needed that glimpse to realise entirely that fet the core of tho thing there was a man at all. Iu war one sees so much of the machinery, so much of the mere apparatus and tho 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 tho 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 AEKOPLANE. There is a method of firing at aeroplanes—and at other targets, bien entendu —called "bracketing," bursting first a shell short of it, then a shell halfway between the two, and so groping into the true range it appeared that, for all its doubling and plunging, the Taubc was now bracketed in half a dozen positions; if it climbed to get out of range a shell was ready for it; shells would haunt it whichever way it took. In that brielly-seeu 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 the outset, staying within the zone of lire 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 i like a range. The 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 a white puff-ball, like an heraldic cloud, obscured its right wing for some moments. The gunners swarmed forth to stare at it; under the ■black rampart of the forest the gun winked again.

"Hey!" the Colonel shouted. The blaek shape of the aeroplane seemed to dive suddenly against a splash of fire that shone aloft, broad against the 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 courseit had come; then tho smoke spread, white and ragged, and out of it there dropped, in a sheer fall, something largo anil formless, that crashed to earth upon the iron clods half a mile ahead of the iioises-of our peering dumb guns. "A direct hit!," cried the Colonel. "You saw it, eh!" The shell hadn't burst when it hit hiin—beautiful! I must teiophone 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 ua, 100 yards away, there sounded thestunnipgTsar 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.