Joe could nose-dive to perfection.  He would hover high up, at well over ten thousand feet from the ground, then drop straight for the earth, like a plummet, nose directly downward, seemingly bent on destruction.  When still at a safe distance up, he would gradually ease his rush through the air by “teasing her a bit,” as he called it.  Then, before the eye from below could follow his evolutions, he would be skimming off on a level course like a swallow.

The day came at last when the squadron was “moved up front” for actual work over the enemy’s lines.  The Brighton boys were ready and eager to give a good account of themselves, and soon they were to be accorded ample opportunity.

CHAPTER VI

THE FIGHT IN THE AIR

The morning on which the Brighton boys left the base airdrome with their squadron saw the first sunshine that that part of France had known for several days.  The line of light motor trucks which served as their transport skimmed along the long, straight roads as if aware that they carried the cavalry of the air.

“France is a pretty country.  I had no idea it would look so much like home.  Those fields and the hills beyond might be right back where we come from, boys,” said Archie Fox.

“Wait till you youngsters get up a bit,” advised a companion who had seen the front line often before.  “You will see a part of France that won’t remind you of anything you have ever seen!”

In spite of that mention of the horrors that they all knew war had brought in its train, it was hard to imagine them while swinging along at a good pace through countryside that looked so quiet and peaceful.  The line of lorries slowed down for a level crossing, where the road led across a spur of railway, and then halted, the gate-keeper having blocked the highway to allow the passing of a still distant and very slowly moving train.  The gate-keeper was a buxom and determined-looking French woman of well past middle age, who turned a deaf ear to the entreaties of the occupants of the leading car that the line of trucks should be allowed to scurry across before the train passed.

As the boys sat waiting in the sudden quiet, Picky Mann said quietly: 

“We are getting nearer.  Listen to the guns.”

Sure enough, their attention drawn to the distant growling, the dull booming of the detonations of the high-explosive shells could be distinctly heard.  War was ahead, at last, and not so very far ahead at that.  Not long after, the squadron passed through a shattered French village.

Every one of the boys had seen pictures in plenty of shell-smashed ruins, but the actuality of the awful devastation made them hold their breath for a moment.  To think that such desolate piles of brick and mortar were once rows of human habitations, peopled with men, women and children very much like the men, women and children in their own land, sobered the boys.