gh the hot morning. His big guns have
suddenly become nervously active. Then, a little murmur along the pits
and trenches, and from somewhere over behind us, this air-shark drives
up the sky. The enemy's balloons splutter a little, retract, and go
rushing down, and we send a spray of bullets as they drop. Then against
our aerostat, and with the wind driving them clean overhead of us, come
the antagonistic flying-machines. I incline to imagine there will be a
steel prow with a cutting edge at either end of the sort of aerostat I
foresee, and conceivably this aerial ram will be the most important
weapon of the affair. When operating against balloons, such a
fighting-machine will rush up the air as swiftly as possible, and then,
with a rapid contraction of its bladders, fling itself like a knife at
the sinking war-balloon of the foe. Down, down, down, through a vast
alert tension of flight, down it will swoop, and, if its stoop is
successful, slash explosively at last through a suffocating moment.
Rifles will crack, ropes tear and snap; there will be a rending and
shouting, a great thud of liberated gas, and perhaps a flare. Quite
certainly those flying machines will carry folded parachutes, and the
last phase of many a struggle will be the desperate leap of the
aeronauts with these in hand, to snatch one last chance of life out of
a mass of crumpling, fallen wreckage.

But in such a fight between flying-machine and flying-machine as we are
trying to picture, it will be a fight of hawks, complicated by bullets
and little shells. They will rush up and up to get the pitch of one
another, until the aeronauts sob and sicken in the rarefied air, and the
blood comes to eyes and nails. The marksmen below will strain at last,
eyes under hands, to see the circling battle that dwindles in the
zenith. Then, perhaps, a wild adventurous dropping of one close beneath
the other, an attempt to stoop, the sudden splutter of guns, a tilting
up or down, a disengagement. What will have happened? One combatant,
perhaps, will heel lamely earthward, dropping, dropping, with half its
bladders burst or shot away, the other circles down in pursuit.... "What
are they doing?" Our marksmen will snatch at their field-glasses,
tremulously anxious, "Is that a white flag or no?... If they drop now we
have 'em!"

But the duel will be the rarer thing. In any affair of ramming there is
an enormous advantage for the side that can contrive, anywhere in the
f