WAR

Cerisy, a hamlet on the left bank of the Somme, the British antiaircraft artillery
opened up at the Circus machines. Brown spotted the white puffs and headed
toward them, almost immediately catching sight of the German formations. He
waggled his wings and dived to the attack. At the same moment the German pilots
saw the Camels and rose to meet them.
From 12,000 feet seven stubby olive drab Camels howled down. May stayed
behind—to watch. The attack fell first on the Kette led by Weiss. Head-on was
the best way to meet an attack. That way one's own machine presented the
smallest target and one could bring one's own guns to bear. The flashy Circus
machines—red, yellow, white, green, blue—reared up and the patrols came
together. Machine guns crackled as the flyers squeezed off their first shots simultaneously.
Curling lines of tracer smoke speared through the air. The machines
closed at a combined speed of two hundred miles an hour. When they came
together at the first pass they broke up or down, left or right, or went through
the enemy formation, then whipped around in an instant to try to get on a man's
tail. The fight was a sudden, whirling explosion; a tight vicious merry-go-round.
With motors full on and racketing, the aeroplanes spun around one another like
a flock of noisy butterflies. A blue-tailed Tripe dived straight down out of the
fight, Mellersh right after him. Two Albatros dived after Mellersh. The deafening
dance continued. No man held a straight course or a steady bank for more than a
second lest another man get on his tail or nail him with a deflection shot the way
a hunter kills ducks by leading them. The ear grows accustomed to a steady loud
noise and soon one ceases to hear it. The pilot flys along in a kind of deafening
silence. So the fighter pilots of the Great War heard nothing while in the air,
not the engines of other ships in formation, nor their own voices raised in
shouts of anger, joy, or despair, but only the clatter of machine guns; and in a
fight if they heard machine guns they knew they were the targets of the shooting.
Lieutenant Mellersh had been so hotly chased by the Albatros pair from
Jasta 5 that the only way he could escape was by throwing his Camel into a spin
and letting it drop to zero altitude. His pursuers were put off by the spinning of
the machine and Mellersh pulled out almost at ground level and hedge-hopped for
British territory where he put his shot-up machine down safely inside the lines.
About two miles north of Corbie the Somme, canalized as an improved waterway,
makes a right-angled turn roughly south. As Mellersh passed over the course of
the river he recognized Roy Brown's Camel over that right-angle bend; north
of the bend he saw a red Triplane going down.
Wilfred May, circling at 12,000 feet as Brown led the Camels down, had
watched the fight begin with the head-on clash; saw the centrifugal explosion of
machines as they came to grips; saw the whirlwind of action as they turned and
began chasing tails; saw the fight settling lower and drifting west in the wind.
A German machine rose up out of the fight and arched back down into it.
May watched. The first Hun he had ever seen. God. What would he do if one
of them came at him Another one! He dived at the machine. It was too much
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