After a brief respite on the return from this second raid, the machines again took off and raided the Huns for the third time that night. All that were left of this weary group of aviators returned from this third raid in broad daylight, with nerves strained to the verge of a breakdown; some were in tears, some striving to be gay, and some were very quiet, but all were happy in knowing that they had "done their damndest." When afterward they learned that the "push" had been successful and that the Hun reserves had failed to appear, their grief for the "missing" was softened by the thought that _their_ sacrifice had not been in vain; it had brought about the full accomplishment of the purpose of the raids--C'est la Guerre-- II Probably the first time that a Rhine town was bombed on a densely cloudy night was in the spring of 1918 and it was bombed by a small Scotchman called "Jock." The wind that night was from the northeast, a favorable wind from the aviators' point of view because it was against them on the outward voyage. Shortly after crossing the lines, however, dense clouds coming up with the wind obliterated the earth, and all the aviators except Jock turned back hoping to find their aerodrome before it was also blotted out by the low-lying clouds. Jock, however, was "keen" on bombing Hun factories, and the objective that night was the Badische Works situated on the river Rhine; so Jock held to his compass course and flew for over four hours without once seeing the ground. When a sufficient time had elapsed to bring him over his target, if his previous reckoning, of course, of ground speed and drift was correct, and if the wind had not varied in velocity or strength, Jock "spiralled" down through the clouds and, finding the ground beneath him nothing but dense blackness, glided lower and lower until eventually a large town directly beneath him became visible and then the river Rhine, passing between Ludwigshafen on the west and Mannheim on the east, was lit up by the rays of the moon coming through a sudden rift in the clouds. Jock by now was only eight hundred feet above Mannheim; he opened up his throttle and circled around the city while his navigation officer on his large-scale chart compared the landmarks momentarily made visible by the rift in the clouds. At last, thoroughly satisfied as to their position, fourteen one-hundred-and-twelve-pound bombs were dropped as near the factory as possible. If some of these bombs dropped in the town itself, it was not due to intention on the part of the aviators, who, blinded by searchlights, could not be sure of sending all the bombs with accuracy. With over one hundred and sixty miles to travel in a plane riddled with shrapnel from the bursting shells, the prominent thought in the minds of the aviators was, that their work being accomplished, their next move was to "beat it" in the direction where lay friendly country.