I thought, right after we got the German, that our own time had come. For our aëroplane began falling with a rapidity to make you gasp for breath. It was describing the most eccentric spirals and plunging almost as dizzily as the Fokker. I yelled at Lieut. Larkin, though hopelessly, my voice sounded so small. I was dazed. Yet he told me afterward that my voice reached him. It caused him to turn his head. For the first time I saw his bloody, wounded face. I saw also that his hands had fallen away from the controls and that he was reaching out helplessly toward them. Of course, when we came into sight out of the clouds the enemy had started all the archeys, and shrapnel from a bursting shell had torn Larkin’s face cruelly. The shock had knocked him out for a brief instant. I admit having uttered a swift, frantic prayer as I saw him reaching out so feebly to regain his controls. But with his splendid courage, he suddenly braced. We were about 1700 feet above the enemy lines when he again succeeded taking direction of the machine. To have tried to climb directly up again in the enemy fire must have meant our destruction. We would have been too fair a target. Instead, Larkin boldly shot straight downward directly toward the aërial batteries and the trenches. They thought us hit and falling and fled from their places in fear of being caught in the crash. Larkin shot his plane not fifty feet above the Boche trenches, but none of them took even so much as a rifle shot at us. They either ran or cowered in the trenches as we swept past. Then he shot up again, cleared a small, wooded section of knolls and dropped behind them, thus successfully getting out of the range of the archeys. Larkin turned once again to me his blood-reddened countenance. This time he grinned bravely, coolly. “It’s quite all right, Dave,” he called. “The wounds are nothing. I’m feeling quite fit again. We’ve got to spot that battery.” So up we went. We mounted some 15,000 feet. The archeys promptly and furiously got after us again. They spread a circular fire about us. That is the way the archeys go after aëroplanes, not shooting directly at them but trying to surround them with a fire that must smash them whichever direction they may take in seeking to escape destruction. Meanwhile, I was working my camera for all it was worth and peering upon and around the country with my glasses. There were several small clutters of heavily wooded knolls marking the landscape below us and the rattle and roar of the archeys were suddenly joined by the crash and boom of bigger guns and the distant reply of our own batteries. I began banging my wireless exultantly. For down in the largest clutter of knolls, under a cloak of foliage so naturally dense and perhaps artificially assisted and affording full concealment ordinarily, I had seen that instant sudden sparks or flares as emitted from the throats of the big batteries’ guns in action.