But they had not recovered their breath when the pilot, somehow extricating himself from his seat in the falling plane, gave a wild leap. His jump was inward in the V-shaped formation. Men held their breath as he dropped straight downward. Then someone gave a shout. It was all in the fraction of a minute, but it seemed an eternity of time. So far as could be seen from the ground his leap was but a few yards to the next plane, and he was almost directly above it. The shout that had been one merely of startled anticipation broke into tremendous applause as, for only a second, the falling man was obscured from sight by the wings of the plane under him, and then that plane quivered for a moment as with a tremendous shock, then righted itself, and the pilot, evidently divining rather than having seen what had happened, and having received the frantic signals of half a dozen pilots nearest him, began a slow and cautious descent downward. “He landed safely!” one man shouted frantically. “Looks like it, but he may be unconscious and roll off any minute,” another supplemented. Men stood breathless, their hearts seeming hardly to beat, in the face of this most thrilling of all the excitements they ever had witnessed or participated in. Four other heavier planes stood by the smaller one as it began its descent, and then, “Look! Look!” the cry went up, as a big, swift German machine hovered for a moment in the skies like a giant vulture, then swooped downward with a speed that was startling, straight for the little group that had formed to save a single American life. Even as it did so, two large American planes detached themselves from the bombing formation, and headed for the Boche. They took him on either side just as he opened his machine guns at the smaller planes below. Throughout the war there was a chivalry among the airmen of the enemy armies that was at once an inspiration and an honor. The few violations of it gave it greater emphasis. This pilot evidently was one of those brutes who, had he been a submarine commander, would have taken rescued men upon his deck, and then submerged, to let them drown like rats; or one, maybe, who could calmly murder children, girl children, of his own country, and mutter, “One less mouth to feed.” For it is of record that some Germans did commit these and even greater atrocities throughout the war. From a little above and on either side of him, the American planes opened a terrible fire—it was a fire of machine gun and incendiary bullets—and a dozen struck him at the same time. There was a burst of flame that swept the plane from stem to stern; its nose suddenly turned downward, and with a dive that only narrowly missed the little group on which the German had directed his attack, he fell to earth a mixed and mangled mass of man and mechanism.