" Green Balls " The Adventures of a Night-Bomber BY PAUL BEWSHER William Blackwood and Sons Edinburgh and London 1919 TO MY FAITHFUL FRIEND, WHO DURING THE WAR PROTECTED ME FROM THE ENEMY AND A THOUSAND TIMES SAVED MY LIFE, THE NIGHT SKY....

Lest it should appear that in this book I have worked the personal pronoun to death, I wish to explain my reasons for describing always my own feelings, my own experiences, my own thoughts. I feel that the lay public who did not fly in the war, and knew little of its excitements and monotonies, would rather hear of the experiences of one person, related by himself, than merely a journalistic record of events which had come to his notice. Therefore I have tried faithfully to describe the sensatio

THE DAWN PATROL. Somebody shakes me by my shoulder, and I wake to the consciousness of a dark room and a determined steward. "Four o'clock, sir!" I get out of my warm bed, very unwillingly, and dress lightly in a white cricket shirt, grey flannel trousers, and a blue pea-jacket and a muffler, and go out of the hut to the garage. Dawn is just breaking. The sky is still bright with stars, and a moon is drowsily hanging like a golden gong in the south-west. The air is extraordinarily fresh and cold

TO FRANCE! When I arrived at the Handley-Page aerodrome I realised that, for the second time in the war, I was to have the good fortune to be attached to a pioneering branch of the Air Service, and that, instead of going to a cut-and-dried task, I was to assist in operations which had been untried and were entirely experimental. I had been, as a second-class air mechanic, a balloon hand on the very first kite balloon used by the British, and had accompanied it to the Dardanelles on a tramp steam

THE FIRST RAID. Night! Before I knew I was to fly through the darkness over the country of the enemy; night had been for me a time of soft withdrawal from the world—a time of quiet. It still held its old childhood mystery of a vague oblivion between day and day, an unusual space of time peopled by slumberous dreams in the gloom of a warm, familiar bed. Night was a time in which busy and scattered humanity collected once more to the family hearth, and careless of the wet darkness outside, careles

UP THE COAST. In the train on the way to Dover my pilot told me, with a dismal expression over-shadowing his face, a piece of bad news. "Do you know," he said, "while we were on leave a Handley got shot down off Zeebrugge! ---- was the pilot, and I think he was drowned. One gunlayer was saved, badly wounded. A French seaplane which picked up the other got shot down too! We were well off at Luxeuil!" With this discouraging information, casting a gloom over the immediate outlook, we crossed the Do

COASTWISE LIGHTS. From the aerodrome at Dunkerque five Short night-bombing machines were operating. These were large single-engined machines with a very long stretch of wings, and, apart from the Handley-Pages, were the biggest machines in use on the Western Front, and carried the heaviest weight of bombs. While the Handley-Pages were getting ready, these Short machines, with their ten wonderfully skilled pilots and gunlayers, slipped off unostentatiously into the dark to Bruges and Zeebrugge, n

BRUGES. Overhead sounds the beating of many engines, and here and there across the stars I can see moving lights. The first two or three machines are already up. The carry-on signal has been given. A machine which has just left the aerodrome passes a few hundred feet overhead with a roar and a rush. Its dark shape blots out the stars, and I can see the long blue flames pouring back from the exhaust-pipes of the engines. I walk along the dim path and a shadowy figure meets me. "Is that you, Dowsi

DAWN TO DAWN. I suddenly wake, and sit up in bed with strained ears. I have a dim recollection of a noise. Then I hear three or four dull explosions like distant gunfire, and out wails the piteous appeal of "Mournful Mary" at the Dunkerque docks. Zoop-zoop ... bo-o-o-o-m! The last is a tremendous explosion. I wonder what is happening. "Did you hear that? Any one awake?" I call out softly. "That you, Paul—what can it be?" answers a voice in the darkness from some near-by cabin. "I'll go and see."

THE LONG TRAIL. Early in the war it became necessary to destroy a railway bridge some way behind the German lines. This structure was an important link in the enemy's lines of communication, and its destruction was of vital importance. The work was given to one of the very early squadrons to accomplish, and it was carried out in rather an unusual way. From the moonlit aerodrome there rose into the quiet night a little two-seater B.E. 2C. machine, with a pilot and an observer as the crew. Soon th

TRAGEDY. "To-night an attempt is going to be made to sink blocking vessels, filled with cement, in the harbour mouths at Ostend and Zeebrugge. It is intended, as a distraction, to land specially trained men on the Mole, where they are going to burn down and destroy everything they can. "The whole plan has been under consideration for weeks, and has been carefully worked out. We have been given the task of lending assistance by two methods—by desultory bombing, and by dropping flares. I have here

WITH A KITE BALLOON AT THE DARDANELLES. "Show a leg! Show a leg! Rise up and shine! Lash up and stow! The sun's burning your bloomin' eyes out!" So bellows the Master at Arms down the hammock flat, and I awake to see above, outlined by the edges of the hold, a square panel of burnt blue Asiatic sky. Across my hammock strikes a scorching beam of sunlight, and in a few moments I have pulled over my bare skin a washed-out overall suit and have put my naked feet into a heavy pair of boots, and I am