"Then in mercy's name fire!" A short, sharp nose-dive of two hundred feet, and they were within a hundred feet of the leviathan, and immediately above her. So near were they that they could see the affrighted machine-gunners on the top of the gas-bag leave their posts and try to escape down the escalier, but they had left it too long. They were now about to pay the price for the toll they had wantonly taken of innocent lives during the long dark hours of the past night. And, like all cowards who wreak their vengeance upon helpless folk, they feared the dread spectre when it came close to themselves. "Whis-s-sh! Boom-m-m!" went the first bomb; a time fuse fixed for two seconds. The explosion rent the envelope, and allowed vast quantities of gas to escape from two of the ballonets, so that the huge mass crumpled in at the head, and began to sink slowly at the nose. Another bomb was dropped, and the second and third machines coming up, dropped petrol and phosphorus bombs, which blazed away, igniting the escaping gas. She was well alight now, and in the fore part she was burning fiercely, but as yet she did not explode. Dastral saw that she was done for, however, and knowing that the enemy craft could not be far away after all this time, made off and signalled his men to follow. Down, down went the blazing mass for a couple of thousand feet, then rolling over, it literally fell asunder into several parts, and each part, still burning, carried its helpless inmates down to destruction. Once more Dastral looked round, and as he did so, he gasped out the words: "Great Scott! The whole place is alive with Fokkers, Rolands and Aviatiks!" Then followed a fierce running fight, in which the English were outnumbered three to one. The enemy were all around them, for they had been called by wireless from every direction. Dastral headed his men into the thick of the combat. Three German 'planes were brought down, and not till every round of ammunition was fired, and every drum empty did the Commander call off his Flight again, or rather what was left of it. Brum, fighting bravely to the last, had gone down in a whirling spiral after first sending down an Aviatik. Steve followed him a little later, with his machine blazing, for his petrol tank had been plugged time after time. Dastral alone, with Mac, both their machines damaged beyond repair and both their observers wounded, staggered through the curtain fire at the trenches later in the morning, and came to earth just behind the British first line. CHAPTER V A BOMBING RAID DAWN was just breaking over Devil's Wood and Ginchy. The owls and bats which had flitted over the night-bivouacs had returned to their hiding places about the battered towers of the old church near by. A saffron tint flushed the low summit of the eastern ridge, beyond Combles and Ginchy, while thin blue-grey columns of smoke showed where the Germans held fast their steel line from the Somme to Bapaume.