Carry On!

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Excerpt: ... one of the men to convey an order to the mounted group. A dozen of the troopers rode away westward, in the direction of the Euphrates. The rest dismounted again. While some of them brought picketing ropes and attached them to the aeroplane, others began to beat down the rushes that edged the northern boundary of the open space. Then two of the horses were yoked to the ropes, and dragged the machine slowly towards the track which the troopers were hastily making. Burnet came to the conclusion that they intended to draw the aeroplane to a wady somewhere to the north, float it there, perhaps on an extemporised raft, and so convey it to the river. As soon as the aeroplane began to move, the officer gave an order to the two men standing sentry over Captain Ellingford, and then Burnet saw for the first time that his friend was wounded. The Turks helped him to his feet, with a care that showed a certain chivalrousness, and supported between them he limped after his machine. Burnet felt utterly helpless. Alone against forty or fifty men, he could do nothing, either to rescue his friend or to save the aeroplane. True, night was approaching: the Turks could not complete their preparations for floating the machine that day; he might follow them up on the chance of finding an opportunity in the darkness of getting the captain away, if not of destroying the engine. But on second thoughts he recognised the almost certain futility of such a course. Ellingford was wounded, probably unable either to endure the fatigue of walking or to sit a horse. It was scarcely likely that circumstances would again favour such audacious but hazardous schemes as had already twice won success. Burnet felt that an attempt to make off with a couple of horses would be to strain good fortune too heavily. Yet it went utterly against the grain to allow a British officer to remain a prisoner with the Turks, or a British aeroplane to take place in a Turkish flight. One resource remained,...