A Blind Man Comes Down from the Sky.

Huntly Press and District Gazette, Volume 4, 11 June 1915, Page 3

A Blind Man Comes Down from the Sky.

A MIRACULOUS THING THAT REALLY HAPPENED.

In all the lurid and extravagant pages of Victor Hugo, the greatest of the French romantic writers, there is nothing to equal the incredible episode whose story conies from the firing line of our gallant Allies In France. Two men flew up in a military aeroplane from a point on the French front, and sailed over the German lines.

When they were at a height of nearly a mile and a quarter, a German shell burst around them mortally wounding the observer and blinding the plot. Neither man knew of the other’s condition. The Pilot ctied aloud to his passenger, but, receiving no answer, tried to steer his machine by the sounds beneath him. At the end of two minutes the observer revived, and a warning shout from him enabled the pilot to avoid a church steeple. Then the passenger, discovering the state of the case, guided the course until a slow volplane brought the machine safely to the ground, with one of its occupants a corpse and the other miraculously safe from the last flight he will make.

Had he lived to see aeroplanes and to know of their use in war, Victor Hqgo would have loved to depict just such a scene as this. But the incidents of this war, the tableaux of terror, horror, and pathos on the one hand, and of courage, heroism, and resource on the other, are in advance of fiction.