Following the Chance
“This was where he would perhaps have been wise to have thrown up and returned to his ’drome. He hung on in the hope that the engine would pick up again—as engines have an unaccountable way of doing—and even when he found himself dropping back out of place in the formation he still stuck to it and followed on. He knew the risk of this; knew that the straggler, the lame duck, the unsupported machine is just exactly what the Hun flyer is always on the lookout for; knew, too, that his Flight-Commander before they had started had warned him (seeing the trouble he was having to start up) that if he had any bother in the air or could not keep place in the formation to pull out and return. Altogether, then, the trouble that swooped down on him was his own fault, and you can blame him for it if you like. But if you do you’ll have to blame a good many other pilots who carry on, and in spite of the risk, do their best to put through the job they are on. He finally decided—he looked at the clock fixed in front of him to set a time and found it showed just over one minute to twelve—in one minute, at noon exactly, if his engine had not steadied down to work, he would turn back for home.
“At that precise moment—and this was the first warning he had that there were Huns about—he heard a ferocious rattle of machine gun fire, and got a glimpse of streaking flame and smoke from the tracer bullets whipping past him. The Huns, three of them and all fast fighting scouts, had seen him coming, had probably watched him drop back out of place in the flight, had kept carefully between him and the sun so that his glances round and back had failed to spot them in the glare, and had then dived headlong on him, firing as they came.
“They were coming down on him from astern and on his right side, or, as the Navals would put it, on his starboard quarter, and they were perhaps a hundred to a hundred and fifty yards off when Ricky first looked round and saw them. His first and most natural impulse was to get clear of the bullets that were spitting round and over him, and in two swift motions he had opened his engine full out, thrust his nose a little down, and was off full pelt. Promptly the three astern swung a little, opened out as they wheeled, dropped their noses, and came after Ricky, still a little above him, and so fairly astern that only the center one could keep a sustained accurate fire on him. (A scout’s gun being fixed and shooting between the blades of the propeller—gun and engine being synchronized so as to allow the bullet to pass out as the blade is clear of the muzzle—means that the machine itself must be aimed at the target for the bullets to hit, and two outer machines of the three could only so aim their machines by pointing their noses to converge on the center one—a risky maneuver with machines traveling at somewhere about a hundred miles an hour.)
“But the fire of that center one was too horribly close for endurance, and Ricky knew that although his being end-on made him the smaller target, it also made his machine the more vulnerable to a raking shot which, piercing him fore and aft, could not well fail to hit petrol tank, or engine, or some other vital spot. He could do nothing in the way of shooting back, because, being a single-seater scout himself, his two guns were trained one to shoot straight forward through the propeller, the other, mounted on the top plane on a curved mount allowing the gun to be grasped by the handle above him and pulled back and down, to shoot from direct ahead to straight up? Neither could shoot backward.
“Ricky, the first shock of his surprise over, had gauged the situation, and, it must be admitted, it was