'V'la,' said Rose, pointing suddenly.
Trots avions - la.'
Ronnie twisted round in excitement to Howard.
'They're coming down towards us!
Do you think we'll see them close?'
'Where are they?' he enquired. He strained his eyes in the direction from which they had come.
'Oh, I see.
They won't come anywhere near here.
Look, they're going down over there.'
'Oh..." said Ronnie, disappointed.
'I did want to see them close.'
They watched the aircraft losing height towards the road, about two miles away.
Howard expected to see them land among the fields beside the road, but they did not land.
They flattened out and flew along just above the tree-tops, one on each side of the road and one behind flying down the middle.
A little crackling rattle sounded from them as they came.
The old man stared, incredulous - it could not be...
Then, in a quick succession, from the rear machine, five bombs fell on the road.
Howard saw the bombs actually leave the aeroplane, saw five great spurts of flame on the road, saw queer, odd fragments hurled into the air.
From the bus a woman shrieked: 'Les Allemands!' and pandemonium broke loose.
The driver of the little Peugeot car fifty yards away saw the gesticulations of the crowd, looked back over his shoulder, and drove straight into the back of a mule cart, smashing one of its wheels and cascading the occupants and load on to the road.
The French around the bus dashed madly for the door, hoping for shelter in the glass and plywood body, and jammed in a struggling, pitiful mob in the entrance.
The machines flew on towards them, their machine-guns spitting flame.
The rear machine, its bombs discharged, flew forward and to the right; with a weaving motion the machine on the right dropped back to the rear centre, ready in its turn to bomb the road.
There was no time to do anything, to go anywhere, nor was there anywhere to go.
Howard caught Sheila and Ronnie and pulled them close to him, flat on the ground.
He shouted to Rose to lie down, quickly.
Then the machines were on them, low-winged, single engined monoplanes with curious bent wings, dark green in colour.
A burst of fire was poured into the bus from the machines to right and left; a stream of tracer-bullets shot forward up the road from the centre aircraft.
A few bullets lickered straight over Howard and his children on the grass and spattered in the ground a few yards behind them.
For a moment Howard saw the gunner in the rear cockpit as he fired at them.
He was a young man, not more than twenty, with a keen, tanned face.
He wore a yellow students' corps cap, and he was laughing as he fired.
Then the two flanking aircraft had passed, and the centre one was very near.
Looking up, the old man could see the bombs slung in their racks beneath the wing; he watched in agony for them to fall.
They did not fall.
The machine passed by them, not a hundred feet away.
He watched it as it went, sick with relief.
He saw the bombs leave the machine three hundred yards up the road, and watched dumbly as the debris flew upwards.
He saw the wheel of a cart go sailing through the air, to land in the field.
Then that graceful, weaving dance began again, the machine in the rear changing places with the one on the left.
They vanished in the distance; presently Howard heard the thunder of another load of bombs on the road.
He released the children, and sat up on the grass.
Ronnie was flushed and exerted.
'Weren't they close!' he said.
'I did see them well.
Did you see them well, Sheila?
Did you hear them firing the guns?'
He was ecstatically pleased.
Sheila was quite unaffected.
She said: 'May I have some orange?'