could to win the World War.

I first met Mac a few months after he flew a Handley-Page machine from
London to Constantinople and back to Salonica, a distance of over two
thousand miles. Mac was a Captain then, he is a Captain now, but no
living man has done more damage to the Hun than Mac has done. A far
greater leader of men than his great uncle, who was a General in our
Civil War, Mac gave a soul to the Bedouin Squadron. To Mac's leadership
is due the first bombings of Mannheim, Coblenz, Thionville, Frankfort,
and Cologne.

It was Mac who flew a German aeroplane to Sedan, followed a "spotted"
train to a near-by station, swooped down as the German High Command left
the train and opened on them with his machine gun. It was Mac who
landed over ten times near Karlsruhe at night and returned with
invaluable information. But it is not because of the innumerable
suicidal adventures of which Mac is the hero that every Bedouin, no
matter in what part of the world he may be, always drinks a silent toast
to Mac whenever possible; it is because every Bedouin realizes that a
great man carried out a small man's job in a great way.

V

"Gus" was the president of the Bedouin mess, and probably because of an
early education at Heidelberg, he believed in starving the British
aviator. At all events, while Gus was mess president we all starved with
agonizing slowness, for Gus had but two ideas of what constituted a
menu. Our meals consisted solely of "bully beef" and Brussels sprouts;
this meal was varied occasionally by leaving out the sprouts. To every
indignant complaint from long-suffering members of the officers' mess,
Gus would answer with the incontrovertible statement that
"humming-birds' tongues cannot be purchased with tuppence"; this
incontrovertible statement always reduced the complaining member to
frothings at the mouth and other signs of inexpressible rage.
Nevertheless, under the starvation system of Gus's stewardship a large
credit balance was established at the Societe Generale, which enabled
the succeeding mess president to replace the expert electrician, who by
army wisdom had been converted into a poisonous cook, with a Frenchman,
whose cooking was not cooking at all, but an art which filled the
Bedouins with admiration and destroyed their waist lines. Six-course
banquets, ending with a rare old yellow Chartreuse, became the order of
the day, and whenever some seductive delicacy defied analysis we would
ask G