His fingers went from his bomb levers to his throttle to open it wider; the detonations which had followed him ceased; his hand flew back to his lever and the bursts began again. All the time his hand on the control stick kept tension on the gun lanyards; ceaselessly those jets from his machine gun projected through the whorl of his airscrew. He was killing men. He could see them, not as he killed them, but some infinitesimal of a second before; very possibly, indeed, the bullets out of those jets of his machine guns already had pierced the white flashes under the helmets which were faces of Germans gazing up at him or had riddled through the gray bulks of their bodies. But blood had not time to spot to the surface; the shock of the bullets, even when they immediately killed, had not time to dissolve the tautness of those bodies and relax them and let them down before Gerry was flown over them and was gone. He had taken position, when high in the sky a few seconds earlier, so as to sweep the length of the waves of the Germans charging; and though the swiftness of this sweep forbade him from seeing the results, he knew that with his machine guns alone he was taking off many; and though he could not now look back at all, he knew that his bombs, dropped from so close, must be killing many, many more. The Germans attested to that; they scattered and scurried before him; he had no row of gray forms for his target now; to save his cartridges, he had to stop that steady pull on his lanyard; he pursued groups, firing short bursts of bullets till they broke and scattered again. He was not fighting alone, of course; the machines in his flight all had followed him down. He outflew the men on the ground and, rising while he turned, he got view of the field over which he had swept; two of his machines which had followed him, were rising already; the others were still flying low, attacking with machine guns and bombs; and below them, that line of the German attack was halted and broken. He could see spaces where his bombs had exploded or where the machine-gun fire from the airplanes had been most effective and gray-clad forms strewed the ground; between these spots, German officers were reforming ranks and getting men together again. Gerry opened his throttle wide and, circling, climbed a little more; and then, he dove again and gave it to these gathering men. Gave them machine-gun fire alone, now; for his bombs were gone. He could see the work of the bombs better, and sight of that work brought him grim exultation. He was glad that this morning he was no mere duelist of the sky, darting and feinting and dashing in, spinning about and diving high in the heavens to shoot down just one enemy; here he had led an attack which had killed or disabled hundreds. This was no day to glory in single combat.