man who handled the bombs could manipulate it Slower and much less agile than the fighting planes, they were expected to defend themselves but not to attack.
The advance had slowed up, but not entirely stopped while the battle was joined. As yet no bomb had been slipped from its leash, for the right moment still held off.
Looking down Jack could see where the searchlights that sent such broadening streamers aloft were stationed. He could also make out a dim pile that must be the German fortress, strengthened particularly to hold up the Americans, even as that at Verdun had held up the Huns.
Let the "Archies" bark below and the shrapnel burst all around them as it pleased, no one in all that vast armada of the air was paying the slightest attention to such things. They all, in their carelessness of danger, seemed to themselves impervious to the storm of flying missiles.
The slower-moving bombing machines bore the brunt of this furious onslaught, and Jack could tell that the wings of their plane were being cut by the bullets.
It was almost a miracle that so far no one aboard any of the ten big planes seemed to have been struck; or if such a thing had happened the injury did not appear to be serious. They continued to move forward as if all the Huns in
