Mr. Davies and his friend then set off to see what had happened to the train. They came back to say that the bombs had missed the engine and dropped on either side of the track, One had completely demolished an adjacent house, killing an old man and two girls. The windows of the train were well shattered and the steel frame bore marks of bullets.
Lumps of earth and mud decorated its green sides like swallows' nests. It limped back to us a sorry-looking mess.
The planes circled around, but kept at a height of 4,000 feet or more. Peering out of our retreat I counted nine planes, then a batch of three and another of six. An unseen battery of pom-poms in the vicinity opened a crashing fire which had the effect of keeping them high; away to the south we. could hear another battery in action and the distant boom of bursting bombs. The hum of the planes and the firing died away and after what seemed a day but was really only an hour we crawled out, dirty, bleeding from our scratches, and rather shaken.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.