Fifty men were pointing aloft now, all of them crying out as they
pointed:
"Flyer! French flyer !"
I saw it. It was a monoplane. It had, I judged, just emerged from a
cloudbank to the southward. It was heading directly toward our field.
It was high up--so high up that I felt momentarily amazed that all those
Germans could distinguish it as a French flyer rather than as an English
flyer at that distance.
As I looked, and as all of us looked, the balloon basket hit the earth
and was made fast; and in that same instant a cannon boomed somewhere
well over to the right. Even as someone who knew sang out to us that
this was the balloon cannon in the German aviation field back of the
town opening up, a tiny ball of smoke appeared against the sky,
seemingly quite close to the darting flyer, and blossomed out with
downy, dainty white petals, like a flower.
The monoplane veered, wheeled and began to drive in a wriggling,
twisting course. The balloon cannon spoke again. Four miles away, to
the eastward, its fellow in another aviation camp let go, and the sound
of its discharge came to us faintly but distinctly.
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