The Red Glutton with the German Army at the Front by Irvin S. Cobb

After my balloon-riding experience what followed was in the nature of an anticlimax -- was bound to be anticlimactic. Yet the remainder of the afternoon was not without action. Not an hour later, as we stood in a battery of small field guns -- guns I had watched in operation from my lofty gallery seat -- another flyer, or possibly the same one we had already seen, appeared in the sky, coming now in a long swinging sweep from the southwest, and making apparently for the very spot where our party had stationed itself to watch the trim little battery perform.

It had already dropped some form of deadly souvenir we judged, for we saw a jet of black smoke go geysering up from a woodland where a German corps commander had his field headquarters, just after the airship passed over that particular patch of timber. As it swirled down the wind in our direction the vigilant balloon guns again got its range, and, to the throbbing tune of their twin boomings, it ducked and dodged away, executing irregular and hurried upward spirals until the cloud-fleece swallowed it up.