The aeroplanes were
fighting at last, and suddenly about him, above and below, with cries
and uproar rushing out of the four quarters of heaven, striking,
plunging, oversetting, soaring to the zenith and dropping to the ground,
they came to assail or defend the myriads below.
Secretly the Central European power had gathered his flying machines
together, and now he threw them as a giant might fling a handful of ten
thousand knives over the low country. And amidst that swarming flight
were five that drove headlong for the sea walls of Holland, carrying
atomic bombs. From north and west and south, the allied aeroplanes rose
in response and swept down upon this sudden attack. So it was that war
in the air began. Men rode upon the whirlwind that night and slew and
fell like archangels. The sky rained heroes upon the astonished earth.
Surely the last fights of mankind were the best. What was the heavy
pounding of your Homeric swordsmen, what was the creaking charge of
chariots, beside this swift rush, this crash, this giddy triumph, this
headlong swoop to death?
And then athwart this whirling rush of aerial duels that swooped and
locked and dropped in the void between the lamp-lights and the stars,
came a great wind and a crash louder than thunder, and first one and
then a score of lengthening fiery serpents plunged hungrily down upon
the Dutchmen's dykes and struck between land and sea and flared up again
in enormous columns of glare and crimsoned smoke and steam.
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