Pointing gently downwards, he suffered himself to drift. That is, if
one in the midst of a blinding storm and seated in a war-plane may be
supposed to drift. Rather it was being tossed about, constant
vigilance at the controls alone keeping his plane from literally
flopping over and somersaulting here and there, like a dead leaf.

Then without warning he felt the machine dropping down, down, down.
Yet the planes were level and the whole natural resisting power of the
machine was at its usual operation.

"By George! This storm has made an air cave underneath. I must get
busy."

Another twist of the levers and the plane jumped forward, for the first
time feeling no resistance of the storm. And, while he was glancing
around for more light, out he shot like an arrow from a bow into the
clear sunlight, the earth near -- too near, in fact.

Back of him the storm clouds were whisking themselves away so rapidly
that the transition was almost staggering. And below -- what was it he
now saw?

For answer, almost before his own mind had sensed the change, there
came the spatter of Archies by the dozen and the menacing roar of
machine guns, sheltered here and there over the scraggy plain within
the pill-boxes that have of late been substituted for the vanishing
trench lines. Artillery bombardments by the Allies have so devastated
certain regions that trenches have become impossible; hence the
concrete pillboxes.