By this time I thought I knew what Hals had planned. Those pausing, slow, swinging circles had been made in order to get the exact source of the sound, and now Hals was flying towards it--his object the location of one of the enemy's batteries, a new battery, I judged as yet unknown to the Germans, possibly the one that had dropped the shell on the yellow house. Now, had Hals known that the shell was from a battery just getting into action? Because they are men of air as well as of earth, have these soldier-fliers strange powers?
I noticed that the tiny lights from what must be a farmhouse down there, had a way of increasing and as suddenly decreasing from two to four to two; and always the vanishing lights would be patches, not pinpricks, more vivid, too, as though they were not shone through glass, but came from doors that opened into illuminated rooms. And I was wondering why these doors always kept opening and closing. The place must be a brigade headquarters or something equally important. That was it! Soldiers were constantly coming and going. And as regularly appearing, these patches of light grew more lurid, and the guns raged on, I thought with a smile that the firing might well be the slamming of those farmhouse doors, for just then the two had perfectly synchronized--the sudden flaring lights, the faint sound of guns. And then it happened again, one upon the other, and I must have risen to my feet for it dawned upon me--There's the battery over there! Those lights that I thought were part of the farmhouse! Our motor seemed to thunder unnaturally loud then, again they flashed down there, again the faint boom tore up to us. "_Kollosal!_" Hals had spotted the French guns.
Of the race back through the night, I have only the most feverish recollections. I knew we were flying faster than ever before, for the fuselage was throbbing madly and you had a feeling that to escape an awful strain put upon it, the engine was trying to tear itself loose. And then you thought of the need for this speed. Had I been careless with the electric torch? Had we been seen? Might not even now the enemy be after us? Perhaps a telephone call from the battery down to the trenches where the muzzle of an aeroplane gun was tilted to the sky. Or had they telephoned their own aeroplanes to put up after us? Why the speed that Hals evidently deemed necessary?