“Last Saturday night, while our company still lay in garrison, I received orders to start on a flight into the enemy’s country at daybreak the following morning. The assignment was as follows: From the garrison over a French fortress into France, thence westward to Maas to spy out land for French lines of communication and to fly back the entire distance of 300 kilometers (about 186 miles). “By way of preparation maps of the whole region were minutely studied till midnight. Next morning at cock-crow our Gotha-Taube rolled across the city square, then rose and headed westerly. In half an hour we had reached an altitude of 1,200 meters (3,937 feet) above the town. Then we headed for the French border, and immediately my observer, First Lieut. A., called my attention to little black puffs of smoke, and I knew at once we were being fired at by hostile artillery, so climbed to 2,000 meters (7,874 feet). “Next we noticed that three of the enemy’s aeroplanes were pursuing us, but we soon outdistanced and lost sight of them. Later we heard that two of the enemy’s aeroplanes had been brought down by our artillery. Both hands of one of the pilots were said to have been blown away by a shot. “With a threefold ‘Hurrah!’ we now flew over the border toward a battlefield of the war of 1870-71, which we reached without any further untoward incidents. Here we noticed long columns of troops marching from the south toward the northeast. We circled around the place and then started toward Maas. “We were now continuously fired upon. I saw, among other things, how a battalion of infantry stopped in the street and aimed at us. Silently and quietly we sat in our Taube and wondered what would happen next. Suddenly I noticed a faint quivering throughout the whole aeroplane; that was all. As I saw later, one of the planes had four holes made by rifle bullets, but without changing our course on we flew.” THREW SHELLS OVERBOARD The London _Daily Telegraph’s_ Harwich correspondent gives further narratives of the Heligoland fight gleaned from British sailors. They say that many of the German shells which made hits did not burst, and to that fact they attribute the comparative lightness of the British casualty list. “There were five shells in the boiler of the ----,” said one of them, mentioning the name of a destroyer. “If one of them had burst--well it would have been all up with the ship.” “What did you do with them?” he was asked. “Oh, we just shied them overboard. We’ve no room for such rubbish aboard our yacht.” In another instance it is related that a shell fell on the deck of a British ship. There was no immediate explosion. The sailors rushed at it and pushed it into the sea. One incident has been described which shows the grit of the German sailors.