AIR BOMBING AT 18FT.

Dominion, Volume 12, Issue 22, 21 October 1918, Page 6

AIR BOMBING AT 18FT.

Tho Semcni had (rays J. M. N. Jefl'ries in the. "Daily Mail" of August 1) become the main line of partition and defence in Albania. Instead of trenches, one had a long road of wary outposts and sentries peering through trees, infantry, bent double, scurrying along doubtful paths, and groups holding hidden huts in a wood. All this went on miraculously in a parching heat. ' At luici Bridge the'enemy nrtillery was firing intermittently on '.he approaches. This was whero the British airmdii were so courageously active when tho Austrians were retreating across the river. If the ground was not British.the holes in it certainly are. Tho black soil, churned by the feet of thronging fugitives, was punched all round the bridge with great craters made by the airmen's bombs. The airmen's determination to get the bridge was described as unequalled. One pilot forced his way to the bridge in and out and under snd over and through four enemy machines which were Hying all about him with machineguns all ahlazo trying to crash him ore ho could reach the bridge. Ho got a. hit amid the fugitives close to the bridge with one bomb, but he was not • satisfied. He came down to something like 40ft., launched another on tho very brink, and whizzed over, discharging his machine-gun at Lis adversaries as ho went; then back again he came and down to 18ft. above tho bridge, launched his bomb as he swooped over and up> and hit the west side of it full, so that it crumpled up and vehicles could no longer pass. Tho people of the place say that at Fieri, when the Italians approached, an Austrian general, imitating liis superior at Herat, disappeared with his staff iu a dust cloud towards tho passages of the Semcni. It was not long before the Italian troopers came charging into Fieri, led by two liell-for-icather troopers, revolver in one hand and sabre brandished with the. other, and the reins loose. As they came galloping into the midst of their panicked foes they yelled, "Albanians and Russians to the right; Austrians to the left!" and with sabre waves they separated tho sheep from the goats.