“Davis,” I said, “look out for a place to land and we’ll find where we are, then after dinner we’ll fly on home.”
I had no more than gotten the words out of my mouth when a machine gun started to fire at us, again using tracer ammunition. I was convinced that it was all a mistake and that when they saw who we really were they would quit, so, I told Davis to tilt the plane and show the colors of our cocarde as the weather was not clear and any one might make a similar mistake.
Our own aviation never, under any circumstances, approached our balloons suddenly, for the reason that the Germans one time used some allied captured planes in the Château-Thierry offensive, and with the French colors on their cocarde, approached one of our balloons and, unmolested, burned it. Since then all balloons had adopted the policy of firing on any machine which came suddenly out of the clouds toward them. I was positive that this was the case here. Suddenly other guns vigorously began to take up the firing and by the time I saw the foreboding black, German Cross painted on the side of the sausage, the whole balloon machine gun crews had us well in hand. When we went down on the first balloon I was pretty well convinced that it was all up with us, but this time there was no doubt about it, for we had lost far too many of our best pursuit pilots in attacking balloons at low altitudes for me to even hope otherwise, and our pursuit planes were smaller targets, were faster and more maneuverable. What chance in the world, I thought, has a lubberly, two-place observation plane in a hole like this when few of the pursuit planes even ever emerge with their lives?
Here I again hand it all to Davis, for with a bravery and grit that I have seldom seen equaled, and a skill that was uncanny, he did everything imaginable with that plane, but wisest of all he again headed with the wind, our only chance to get out of the mess. That second in banking into the wind was actually the longest of my life—the ground had surely anticipated it for we were truly the apex of the cone of lead and fire from the circular base of guns surrounding the balloon bed. The plane was almost a screen where so many bullets had perforated it. I heard a snap with a dismal twanging sound. One flying wire had been already cut by the barrage, but Davis kept right on twisting the boat as if nothing had happened.
