“Lieutenant J. was hit in the abdomen.  Our motor was put out of commission.  We were trying to volplane across a forest in the distance when suddenly I felt the machine give a jump.  I turned around—­as I was sitting in front—­and found that a second bullet had hit Lieutenant J. in the head and killed him.

“I leaned over the back of the seat and managed to reach the steering apparatus and headed down.  A hail of shots whistled about me.  I felt something hit me in the forehead.  Blood ran into my eyes.  I was faint.  But will prevailed and I retained consciousness.  Just as we were near the ground a gust of wind hit the plane and turned my machine over.  I fell in the midst of the enemy with my dead companion.  The ’red trousers’ were coming from all directions and I drew my pistol and shot three of them.  I felt a bayonet at my breast and gave myself up for dead when an officer shouted:  “‘Let him live!  He is a brave soldier.’

“I was taken to the commanding general of the Seventeenth French army corps, who questioned me, but, of course, got no information.  He said I would later be sent to Paris, but as I was weak from loss of blood and seriously wounded I was taken into their field hospital and cared for.  The officers were very nice to me and when the French fell back I took advantage of the confusion to crawl under a bush, where I remained until our troops came.”

Many occurrences of a similarly thrilling character have been related in the camps of the contending armies.  The above suffice to show the patriotic devotion and heroism of the military forces of the air, which for the first time in history have been a prominent feature of warfare in 1914.

ZEPPELINS IN ACTION

The real story of the performances of air-craft in the has not been told, but there has been enough to give the world a terrifying glimpse of these modern weapons.

The three attacks on Antwerp by a Zeppelin airship brought into action the long predicted onslaught by forces of the air against the ground.  After one of the great German dirigibles had been brought down by gunfire because it was accidentally guided too near the earth, another returned over the city, and the havoc wrought by this single craft realizes the horrors that would follow any concerted attack by a fleet of the aerial destroyers if they were launched against a city.

The Zeppelin is an impressive thing because of its size, cigar-shaped and ranging from 300 to over 500 feet in length, driven at a rate of miles an hour by four propellers and carrying a huge car.  It is most valuable for use at night, of course, but has proved it is capable of doing its deadly work out of range of ordinary gunfire at day.  Artillery has been invented which can reach airships flying at 5,000 feet, but there is not much of it.  The half dozen German Zeppelins which have been destroyed by French and Russian fire met their fate chiefly because they got too near the ground.