First in a great V, like a flock of wild geese, the squadron swept across the sky, every machine in its station. Then, at a signal from the leader, the V broke into three diamond-shaped formations, with the leader at the apex of the triangle which the three flights formed. Another signal and the circus broke into momentary confusion, to reform with much banking and wheeling into a straight line--again with the leader ahead. Backward and forward swept the line; changed direction and wheeled until the machines formed a perfect circle in the sky. "Splendid!" barked the man with the jerking head. An officer, who stood a few paces to his rear, stepped up smartly, saluted, and came rigidly to attention. "Splendid!" said the other again. "You will tell Captain Baron von Bissing that I am pleased and that I intend bestowing upon him the Order _Pour la Mérite_. His arrangements for my protection at Lille and Douai and Menin were perfect." "Majesty," said the officer, "your message shall be delivered." The sightseer swept the heavens again. "I presume that the other machine is posted as a sentinel," he said. "That is a most excellent idea--it is flying at an enormous height. Who is the pilot?" The officer turned and beckoned one of the group behind him. "His Majesty wishes to know who is the pilot of the sentinel machine?" he asked. The officer addressed raised his face to the heavens with a little frown. "The other machine, general?" he repeated. "There is no other machine." He focused his glasses on the tiniest black spot in the skies. Long and seriously he viewed the lonely watcher, then: "General," he said hastily, "it is advisable that his Majesty should go." "Huh?" "I can not distinguish the machine, but it looks suspicious." _"Whoom! Whoom!"_ A field away, two great brown geysers of earth leaped up into the air and two deafening explosions set the bare branches of the trees swaying. Down the bank scrambled the distinguished party and in a few seconds the cars were streaking homeward. The circus was now climbing desperately, but the watcher on high had a big margin of safety. _"Whoom!"_ Just to the rear of the last staff car fell the bomb, blowing a great hole in the paved road and scattering stones and débris over a wide area. The cars fled onward, skidding at every turn of the road, and the bombs followed or preceded them, or else flung up the earth to left or right. "That's the tenth and the last, thank God!" said the sweating aide-de-camp. "Heaven and thunder! what an almost catastrophe!" In the amazing spaces of the air, a lean face, pinched and blue with the cold, peered over the fuselage and watched the antlike procession of pin-point dots moving slowly along the snowy road. "That's ma last!" he said, and picking up an aerial torpedo from between his feet, he dropped it over the side. It struck the last car, which dissolved noisily into dust and splinters, while the force of the explosion overturned the car ahead.