O’Malley was gone; the man whose hand had helped Gerry also had vanished. Gerry made no attempt to find or follow them as he crouched and ran; the plan was that all would scatter immediately. Machine guns were going; searchlights were sweeping the ground. Gerry fell flat when a beam swung at him, went over and caught some other poor devil. A field piece upon a platform on the edge of the camp opened upon the space a hundred yards beyond Gerry and shrapnel began smashing. One good thing about shrapnel Gerry recognized; it spread smoke which screened the searchlight flares. Another feature was that it and the machine-gun fire was as hard on the police dogs as upon the fugitives. But that was like the Germans--when they were surprised--to let go everything at once. Gerry jumped up and fled, taking his chances with the machine-gun bullets and with the shrapnel which burst all about at random; but he watched the searchlights and threw himself down when they threatened. O’Malley had planned a surprise attack in force--if you can call ten unarmed men a force when attacking a German flying field. But Gerry knew that already the ten must be cut in two. Some of them probably never got out of the tunnel; the machine guns or the shrapnel surely must have accounted for one or two. He heard dogs give tongue as they were taught to do when they had caught prisoners. The Irishman’s plan, wild enough at best, had become hopeless. Gerry had offered no other plan, because he had failed to form anything less mad. But now as he lay on the ground, while a searchlight streamed steadily above him, a plan offered itself. This came from the clouds and from the moon shining through when, as now, the clouds split and parted--from the moon whose rising and shining full O’Malley and he had awaited. They had waited for the moon to furnish them light for their night flight in a German airplane after they got the machine. They had not thought of the moon as bringing them a “ship.” But now, above the rattle of the machine guns and between the smashings of the shrapnel, Gerry heard motors in the air and he knew that night-flying Hun-birds were up. For their pilots, too, had been waiting for the moon for practice. It is all very well to talk about night flying in the dark; but Gerry knew how difficult--almost impossible--is flight in actual darkness. When he had been in training for night flying, years ago at his French training field, he had waited so many weeks for the moon that now he jeered at himself, lying flat under the searchlight beam, for a fool not to have thought of German flyers being up tonight.