[Paths of Glory by Irvin S. Cobb]@TWC D-Link book
Paths of Glory

CHAPTER 10
1/14


In the Trenches Before Rheims After my balloon-riding experience what followed was in the nature of an anticlimax--was bound to be anti-climactic.

Yet the remainder of the afternoon was not without action.

Not an hour later, as we stood in a battery of small field guns--guns I had watched in operation from my lofty gallery seat--another flyer, or possibly the same one we had already seen, appeared in the sky, coming now in a long swinging sweep from the southwest, and making apparently for the very spot where our party had stationed itself to watch the trim little battery perform.
It had already dropped some form of deadly souvenir we judged, for we saw a jet of black smoke go geysering up from a woodland where a German corps commander had his field headquarters, just after the airship passed over that particular patch of timber.

As it swirled down the wind in our direction the vigilant balloon guns again got its range, and, to the throbbing tune of their twin boomings, it ducked and dodged away, executing irregular and hurried upward spirals until the cloud-fleece swallowed it up.
The driver of that monoplane was a persistent chap.

I am inclined to believe he was the selfsame aviator who ventured well inside the German lines the following morning.


<<Back  Index  Next>>

D-Link book Top

TWC mobile books