Читать книгу Best Stories of the 1914 European War - Various - Страница 16

A paragraph in the Excelsior gives details of a 160-mile raid along the frontier by Pegoud in a standard unarmored eighty-horsepower Bleriot-Gnome monoplane with M. Monternier as a fighting passenger. Starting at dawn last Tuesday, they made many valuable observations and destroyed two important convoys with incendiary bombs and 100-pound shells. They flew low, from 1,300 to 1,500 meters, owing to their heavy load of nearly 800 pounds of explosives, enough oil and gasoline for four hours, two carbines and ammunition. They returned to Paris simply to obtain another machine, their own having ninety-seven bullet holes in the wings and having been struck twice by fragments of shells, once on the stabilizer and once under the steering wheel.