t above his
heart, tearing a jagged rent down his breast. Both his feet,
furthermore, were pierced by bullets; but the observer is not
concerned with petty detail.

The observer held his fire until H. A., diving on tail, was
within five yards.

Here it might be mentioned that the machines were hurtling
through space at a speed in the region of one hundred miles an
hour.

The pilot of H. A., having swooped to within speaking distance,
pushed up his goggles, and laughed triumphantly as he took sight
for the shot that was to end the fight. But the observer, had his
own idea how the fight should end.

"I then shot one tray into the enemy pilot's face," he says, with
curt relish, "and watched him sideslip and go spinning earthward
in a train of smoke."

He then turned his attention to his own pilot. The British
machine was barely under control, but as the observer rose in his
seat to investigate the foremost gun was fired, and the aggressor
ahead went out of control and dived nose first in helpless
spirals.

Suspecting that his mate was badly wounded in spite of this
achievement, the observer swung one leg over the side of the
fusillage and climbed on to the wing--figure for a minute the air
pressure on his body during this gymnastic feat--until he was
beside the pilot, faint and drenched with blood, who had
nevertheless got his machine back into complete control.

"Get back, you ass!" he said through white lips in response to
inquiries how he felt. So the ass got back the way he came, and
looked around for the remainder of the H. A.'s. These, however,
appeared to have lost stomach for further fighting and fled.

The riddled machine returned home at one hundred knots while the
observer, having nothing better to do, continued to take
photographs.

"The pilot, though wounded, made a perfect landing"--thus the
report concludes.

When the time came for the assault upon Zeebrugge the value of these
painstaking preparations was made evident. The attack was made from
sea and air alike. Out in the North Sea the great British
battleships steamed in as near the coast as the shallowness of the
water would permit. From the forward deck of each rose grandly a
seaplane until the air was darkened by their wings, and they looked
like a monstrous flock of