A French airman, Lieutenant Marchal, flew right across Germany into
Poland on the night of June 20th. Leaving Nancy at 9.30 p.m., ho dropped leaflets—not bombs—upon Berlin at dawn. Thence, " winding with ease Through the pure marble air his oblique way," he made for the Russian lines. A trivial mishap—the failure of a sparking-plug—unluckily forced him to descend at Kavenczu, near Cholm, only sixty miles west of General Brussiloff's outposts before Kovel, at 8.30 a.m. on June 21st, and he was captured by an Austrian patrol. But Marchal need not regret his plucky feat. To fly, as he did, between eight hundred and fifty and nine hundred miles in eleven hours over a hostile country, braving the varied perils of the dark and the daylight, was an amazing test of his courage and physical endurance, and a proof of the high efficiency of his fast Nieuport monoplane. We like, too, his ironical reminder to the Berliners—" We might have bombarded the open city of Berlin and thus killed innocent women and children, but we merely drop this message." Even Count Zeppelin can hardly miss the point of that.
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