Our Young Aeroplane Scouts in Germany; or, Winning the Iron Cross

by Horace Porter

  CHAPTER VI.

  A FLYING VICTORY.

  IT was a great day for the boys when they set foot in imperial Berlin,with its palaces, art galleries, museums, parliament building,monuments, magnificent parks, and over all its martial spirit.

  Roque, by which name, it might be mentioned, he was not known in thisheart of the empire, soon demonstrated to his charges that he was theman higher up by his manner of getting about, and the high cost ofliving had no worries for him.

  "Who'd have thought that we would be hitched up to a ten-time winnerlike this?" Billy was content for the time being to be allied withpower.

  Among the many who answered the summons of Roque in the intelligencebureau, the young aviators were most interested in a score of blond,blue-eyed, well-set-up Saxons, renowned as Zeppelin navigators, whowere destined to guide the "terrors of the air" in furtherance ofanother raiding plan taking form in the fertile brain of the eminentpromoter of trouble for the enemy.

  While the boys had faith only in the heavier-than-air machines, theyconceded that the risk taken by the Zeppelin crews entitled the latterto brush elbows with the crack flyers of the other kind of bird craft.It was also true that when a Zeppelin got anywhere it was a tremendousfactor in war. And it was no question but that the Fatherland had goneZeppelin mad.

  Woe betide the hostile airmen who dropped the bomb on the Zeppelinworks at Friedrichshaven if Roque had the means of catching them. Itwas only another score that he had marked up against Ardelle, whomthe master agent of the empire charged with planning this destructiveperformance.

  "Roque said he was going to show us where these gas cruisers grow,"Henri advised Billy one evening, getting this news while his chum wasengaged in an argument with a Zeppelin worker.

  "Something I've been wanting to see," exclaimed Billy. "I owe somethingto a Zeppelin, even if it is like a balloon."

  This last was a sort of side swipe at the man who had been on the otherside of the argument.

  "There is one thing sure, these dirigibles can't camp out." This wasBilly's first remark in Friedrichshaven.

  He was peering into a big steel-framed shed with a glass roof whichhoused one of these grim engines of the air--a great cylinder flankedby platforms. This newest of the huge airships was about the length ofa first-class battleship, and the opinion of the young aviator that itcould not drop anywhere and everywhere like the aeroplanes he drove wasnot a prejudiced one.

  When Henri had a look at the powerful motors he was impressed withtheir capacity to drink up petrol at a most appalling rate.

  "What's her top speed?" he asked one of the big fellows who hadtraveled over from Berlin with them.

  "Forty-five miles in the calm," was the reply.

  "Gee!" exclaimed Billy. "We could get a seaplane home for breakfastwhile they were waiting supper on you!"

  "Yet," claimed the Zeppelin expert, "it's the car they're all afraidof."

  "It certainly does look like a scaremark," admitted Henri, whoremembered a certain evening on the Belgian coast, when he was one ofthe company aboard a stranded hydroplane dragged ashore by the swinginganchor of a Zeppelin, which loomed overhead like a cloud, and buzzedlike a million bees.

  A gang of at least a hundred men swarmed about the shed when the orderissued for a trial trip of the new super-Zeppelin, a sample of thefleet in course of building, and Roque carefully noted every detail ofequipment.

  The gas chambers were fed with pure hydrogen, no common coal gas,and many thousand cubic meters were in the flow of this one envelopefilling.

  "Guess they'd have to carry a hydrogen factory around with this outfitto keep it going," observed Billy, as he noted the elaborate process.

  "Not that bad," advised the man at his elbow, "this gas can betransported from the factory in cylinders under pressure."

  "Just think of it," put in Henri, "I heard them say just now that ittook thirty gallons of petrol an hour to buzz these motors."

  "Biggest thing I know in the air business. I wish Captain Johnson couldsee an expense bill like this. He'd have a fit." Billy would, indeed,have counted it a red-letter occasion if his old friend, and the bossairman of Dover, were really at hand to take in this show.

  To go aloft in an airship about which they were not thoroughly postedwas a brand-new experience for the boys, but they were not in the leastdegree like the proverbial cat in a strange garret. It was easy riding,and none of the guns pointed their way. Billy carried a memorandum ofa British military biplane, with a record of 10,000 miles, which Henriand himself had once patched up, that had been hit by 250 rifle bulletsand sixty fragments of shells. He wondered if the immense craft inwhich they were sailing could have floated with, proportionately, aboutten times that amount of lead poured into her. But Billy, of course,did not then know much about Zeppelins.

  Roque, however, was eminently well satisfied, particularly with theimproved method of distributing explosives where they would do the mostharm. The airship had a special armored compartment for bombs near thepropellers and a big gun mounted in front to destroy aeroplanes. "Get afleet of these over the English channel," he proclaimed, "and somebodywould think that hell had been moved upstairs!"

  "I'll say this much," announced Billy, "I'd take an ocean voyage for myhealth if I knew when they were coming."

  "But if the fighting crowd over there had the date and the hour, I'llpromise you that the reception your fleet would receive would be warmenough to boil an egg." This was Henri's prediction.

  "We never advertise," grimly remarked Roque.

  When the Zeppelin had completed her trial trip and had again beenhoused by the small army of workmen, Roque informed the boys that hewas going to give them the chance on the morrow to show their mettle ina biplane test, which was to decide the relative merits as to the speedof two special designs.

  "I am going to put you up to jockey the machine that I favor," he said,"and, mind you, the aviators that will drive against you are among thefinest in our flying corps. I always pick my men by personally knowingwhat they can do in any line of action. They seldom fail me, and it iswith you to make good."

  "We're going some, Herr Roque, when we come up to your standard,"replied Henri.

  "See that you are 'going some' at the finish of the race to-morrow,"laughed Roque.

  "It will be because something breaks if we don't hit the high mark,"assured Billy.

  "Go over and size up your winged steed," directed Roque, pointingto a hangar across the field. "Show them No. 3"--this to one of theattendants.

  "This is no mosquito," announced Billy, after a view of the fine linesof "No. 3."

  "Speed there, I tell you, old boy," was Henri's comment as he walkedaround the rigging, "and carrying armor, too."

  In an hour the boys had fully comprehended all the new features of thisup-to-the-minute machine. They had been builders themselves and knew agood stroke of the business when they saw it.

  Returning across the field, Billy and Henri were introduced to therival aviators by Roque. The German airmen were a jolly pair, andshowed by the professional courtesy they exhibited to the two of theirkind that the coming contest was wholly a friendly one, and the resultsto be of value to the flying corps.

  "No. 2 is a little older than your machine," was the greeting of one ofthe Teuton experts, "but it can hold its own."

  Roque, speaking for his champions, gaily disposed of this claim:

  "Keep your eyes open to-morrow, Fritz, or you will get lost somewherein the rear."

  "No fear, sir; there are no cobwebs on No. 2."

  "What are they talking about, Buddy?" asked Billy.

  "They just think they are going to beat us, that's all," interpretedHenri.

  A bright clear morning presented itself for the aerial race, and LakeConstance lay like a broad mirror under the sunlight. The course wasset due north and straightaway for twenty miles, and the turn fixed ata high point called Round Top, upon which, Roque informed the boys, atall flagstaff had been mounted.

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nbsp; There were no preliminary trials, for both machines had been carefullygroomed, and each was as fit as a fiddle.

  With the aviators up the biplanes scudded down the field for the rise,and got away upon almost equal terms, the German drivers slightly inthe lead, through better acquaintance with the lay of the ground. Theytrailed a yellow streamer, while the boys floated a band of black.

  The ascent reached 2,000 feet, when the machines darted north likearrows. Roque and a group of officers about him followed the speedersthrough field glasses.

  "They would run a swallow to death," remarked the secret agent to theaviation lieutenant at his side.

  The aeroplanes had dwindled in the vision to mere specks, and there wasno telling which was in the fore.

  "Ah, they are headed back!" cried Roque. "Now for the show-down."

  The glasses revealed the specks moving twin-like, and such was theterrific onrush that the crowd surging in the field soon caught a viewof the contestants in growing size.

  One enthusiast shouted: "Fritz will shut them out!"

  But the glasses did not uphold the prediction. The machine with theblack streamer was evidently using the reserve power that had beenclaimed for the newer make, and Henri was getting the best out of it.Yet the first-born craft was being handled in a masterly manner, hadplenty of go to spare, and five miles still rolled between the speedersand the finish flag.

  Now four, and the machines were bow and bow; now three, and the yellowband flapped a few feet behind the black; now two, now within the mile,and the whirring of the motors audible to the nerve-strained watchersbelow--then the close finish--and the white-faced pilot crowned victorwas Billy Barry of Bangor, U. S. A.!

  When the aeroplanes made landing, Roque pushed through the crowd andfavored the Aeroplane Scouts with a forcible slap between the shoulders.

  The victors were quick enough to extend hands to the vanquished.

  "My friend," cried Billy, giving Fritz a warm grip, "it was only fiftyfeet, and it was the new motors that did it."

  Then the crowd cheered, while the efficiency committee agreed withRoque that "No. 3" was the machine to be many times duplicated.

  "That was something over a mile a minute coming back, I guess," figuredBilly.

  "The fastest heavy craft I ever sailed in," was Henri's expressedbelief.

  "I think you youngsters could make a living here if I were to bounceyou," said Roque, who had been talking to some of the factory chiefs."But you are hooked to my train for a while yet. And that reminds methat the mentioned train starts in the direction of Austria in the nexttwo hours. Vienna is not a slow place, you will find."

  As Roque was likely to jump anywhere at the drop of a hat, the boys inhis company had long since lost the emotion of surprise.

  Perpetual motion had become a habit with them.

  In the Austrian capital the travelers encountered many invalids fromthe front, men who limped a little, had an arm in a sling, or abandaged head. The Viennese on the surface did not seem to be greatlyimpressed by the tragedy of the war--evidently becoming used to it--yetthe determination to fight to the finish, while not as grim as inBerlin, was there, nevertheless.

  Another thing that impressed the boys was that here foreign terms werestill much in evidence--French and English. In Berlin it was different.

  As Billy said, "we're in a better mixing town." He and Henri weretold that quite a number of medical and art students from America haddecided that Vienna was safe enough for them, but Roque kept his airmenclose under his wing, and they had no opportunity to pass even the timeof day with any of the U. S. A. crowd.

  They had no present desire, however, to attempt a bolt from Roque anddid not believe, anyway, that their detention was just then seriouslyaffecting their health.

  "Time enough to run," was Billy's philosophy, "when his nobs begins tokick in our ribs."

  They were seeing plenty to keep them interested, the arrival ofsleeping-car trains bringing the wounded to the capital, the movementof troops bound for the Polish or Galician front, the daily sights ofthe Ring and the Kartnerstrasse.

  Roque, as usual, was up to his eyes in war business, ever behind thescenes but ever moving, for there is close military cooperation betweenGermany and Austria-Hungary. All interests related to the war have beenpooled--one empire gives to the other what can be spared. The king-pinof secret agents from Berlin served a purpose wherever he went.

  He sat in no open councils, but privately conducted many of his own,was constantly receiving and dispatching messages, and the devices heoriginated to aid his disguised subordinates burrowing for informationin hostile territory were too numerous for detail. These latteroperations were not accompanied by band music, for officially this livewire had no identity.

  "If that man took a pot shot at the ocean you would never know in whatdirection he was aiming unless you happened to see the splash." Billywas not far from being right in the summing up of Roque's methods.

  Within the next hour the boys "happened to see the splash."

  A uniformed messenger handed Roque a telegram. The secret agent hastilyread it, and sprang to his feet, his eyes aglow with triumphantsatisfaction.

  "I've got Mr. Ardelle in a stone box at last!"