It was all coldly clear and
colourless in the dawn.
He looked up suddenly as a humming sound grew out of nothing and became
swiftly louder. Nearly overhead a German aeroplane was circling down
from an immense height to challenge him. He made a gesture with his left
arm to the gloomy man behind and then gripped his little wheel with both
hands, crouched over it, and twisted his neck to look upward. He was
attentive, tightly strung, but quite contemptuous of their ability to
hurt him. No German alive, he was assured, could outfly him, or indeed
any one of the best Frenchmen. He imagined they might strike at him as
a hawk strikes, but they were men coming down out of the bitter cold up
there, in a hungry, spiritless, morning mood; they came slanting down
like a sword swung by a lazy man, and not so rapidly but that he was
able to slip away from under them and get between them and Berlin. They
began challenging him in German with a megaphone when they were still
perhaps a mile away. The words came to him, rolled up into a mere blob
of hoarse sound. Then, gathering alarm from his grim silence, they gave
chase and swept down, a hundred yards above him perhaps, and a couple of
hundred behind. They were beginning to understand what he was. He ceased
to watch them and concentrated himself on the city ahead, and for a time
the two aeroplanes raced.
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