re and there by the air displacement of
passing shells from the steadily flashing guns of both their own and the
enemy's artillery.

When they arrived at their aerodrome there was a breathing-spell for the
aviators while the bomb-racks were being refilled with bombs, the empty
ammunition drums replaced with full ones, and the engines replenished
with petrol, oil, and water. The planes then roared into the air again,
climbed for a short time, and then headed for Menin, where railway
communications were again bombed and the Menin-Gelevelt road was again
raked with machine-gun fire.

After a brief respite on the return from this second raid, the machines
again took off and raided the Huns for the third time that night. All
that were left of this weary group of aviators returned from this third
raid in broad daylight, with nerves strained to the verge of a
breakdown; some were in tears, some striving to be gay, and some were
very quiet, but all were happy in knowing that they had "done their
damndest."

When afterward they learned that the "push" had been successful and that
the Hun reserves had failed to appear, their grief for the "missing" was
softened by the thought that _their_ sacrifice had not been in vain; it
had brought about the full accomplishment of the purpose of the
raids--C'est la Guerre--

II

Probably the first time that a Rhine town was bombed on a densely cloudy
night was in the spring of 1918 and it was bombed by a small Scotchman
called "Jock."

The wind that night was from the northeast, a favorable wind from the
aviators' point of view because it was against them on the outward
voyage. Shortly after crossing the lines, however, dense clouds coming
up with the wind obliterated the earth, and all the aviators except Jock
turned back hoping to find their aerodrome before it was also blotted
out by the low-lying clouds.

Jock, however, was "keen" on bombing Hun factories, and the objective
that night was the Badische Works situated on the river Rhine; so Jock
held to his compass course and flew for over four hours without once
seeing the ground. When a sufficient time had elapsed to bring him over
his target, if his previous reckoning, of course, of ground speed and
drift was correct, and if the wind had not varied in velocity or
strength, Jock "spiralled" down through the clouds and, finding the
ground beneath him nothing but dense blackness, glided lower and lower
until eventually a large to