ighting planes were marked for death; one
read it in their eyes; but who of us was not?

How those giant cruisers would be downed no man could say, but we
worked on in a blind desperation; we would hold that invading army as
long as men could sight a gun; we would hold them back; and somehow,
someway, we must find the means to repel the invasion from the air!

I saw the lines of track that made a network back to the trenches.
Like the suburban lines around New York, they would carry thousands of
single cars, each driven at terrific speed by the air plane propeller
at its bow. With these, the commanders could shift their forces to
whatever sector was hardest pressed. They would be bombed, of course,
but the hundreds of tracks would not all be destroyed--and the line
must be held!

The line! it brought a strangling lump to my throat as I saw those
thin markings of trenches, the marching bodies of troops, the brave,
hopeless, determined men who went singing to their places in that
line. But my planes were winging past me; my job was ahead, where a
multitude still waited and prayed for deliverance.

* * * * *

We never finished the job; in two days the red horde was upon us.
Their swarming troops were convoyed by planes, but no effort was made
to fly over our lines and launch an attack. Were they feeling their
way? Did they think now that they would find us passive and
unresisting? Did they want to take our cities undamaged? Oh, we asked
ourselves a thousand questions with no answer to any--except the
knowledge that a million men were marching from the north; that their
fleet of planes would attack as soon as the troops encountered
resistance; that our batteries of anti-aircraft guns would harry them
as they came, and our air-fleet, held back in reserve, would take what
the batteries left....

My last planes with their fugitive loads passed close to the lines of
red troops. There were red planes overhead, but they let us pass
unhindered. Fleeing, driving wildly toward the south, we were
unworthy, it seemed, of even their contemptuous attention. But I was
sick to actual nausea at sight of the villages and cities where only a
part of the population had escaped. The roads, in front of the red
columns, were jammed with motors and with men and women and children
on foot: a hopeless tangle.

I was watching the pitiful flight below me, cursing my own impotence
to be of help, when a shrill wh