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Updated: June 1, 2025
"Come on, let's find it!" The little party hurried off toward the landing-ground, a cleared and levelled space further up the mountainside. The light of the burning bungalow helped show them their path; and Craig had also taken an electric flash-lamp from the hangar. With this he led the way. "Right! There it is!" suddenly exclaimed Gabriel, pointing.
Captain Auger who, trusting his star after seven triumphs, had gone scouting alone, was shot in the head, and, after mustering energy enough to bring his machine back to the landing-ground, died almost immediately. Fifty machines destroyed! This had been Guynemer's dream. The apparently inaccessible figure had gradually seemed a possibility. Finally it had become a fact.
Air travel is so comfortably regulated at the present day that Robin Greve, looking back at his trip by air from Croydon Aerodrome to the big landing-ground outside Rotterdam, acknowledged that he had more excitement in his efforts to stir into action a lethargic Dutch passport official in London, so as to enable him to catch the air mail, than in the smooth and uneventful voyage across the Channel.
A dam protecting the landing-ground screens it from the sea. But from the second floor of a little house which the bombs have left standing, you can see its moving expanse of a delicate, I might say timid blue, dotted with home-coming boats. The evening is placid and fine, with a reddish haze blurring the horizon.
My Caudron barely missed colliding with a hedge of fruit trees, rolled down a long incline, and stopped not ten feet short of a small stream. The experience taught me the folly of choosing landing-ground from high altitudes. I needn't have landed, of course, but I was then so much an amateur that the buffeting of cross-currents of air near the ground awed me into it, come what might.
I chose a miniature sugar-loaf mountain for landing-ground. It appeared to be free from obstacles, and the summit, which was pasture and ploughed land, seemed wide enough to settle on. I got the direction of the wind from the smoke blowing from the chimneys of a near-by village, and turned into it. As I approached, the hill loomed more and more steeply in front of me.
The petrol supply is regulated by pressure, and, the pressure having gone when German bullets opened the tank, the engine gets less and less petrol, and finally ceases work. To glide fifteen miles to the lines is clearly impossible. There is nothing for it but to accept the inevitable and choose a good landing-ground. The pilot pushes the joystick slowly forward and prepares to land.
But other stars took their place, those of the French Voisins returning from some bombing expedition, their lights dotting the sky like a moving constellation, while at intervals a rocket shot from one or the other who was anxious not to miss the landing-ground. Over Dunkirk, eight or ten searchlights stretched out their long white arms, thrusting and raking to and fro after the enemy machines.
His magic airplane was still at the works, where he had complained of not having another in reserve; and not being able to wait for it, he sent for his old machine and immediately attacked a D.F.W. at close quarters, as usual; but the Boche was saved by the jamming of both of Guynemer's guns, and the aviator had to get back to his landing-ground.
The commandant of the camp rushed in. He asked, "What have you done with the corpse?" The bread-bakers pointed to Matthews, who apologized for his bad choice of landing-ground. He was hardly scratched. Mac lost his way in the clouds and landed near a small village for gasoline and information. The information he had easily, but gasoline was scarce.
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