An attempt to rise and trust to luck was baulked by my engine losing
speed. A bullet had opened the water cooler, and down, down the 'plane
glided, till a clear space beyond a clump of trees received it rather
easily. I let the petrol run out and fired it to put the machine out of
use. Then a rifle cracked and a bullet tore a hole through my left side,
putting me into the hospital for six weeks.

That forced idleness gave me plenty of time for retrospection.

I lived the previous energetic five months over and over again. I had
little time before to think of anything but my job and its best
possibilities, but the quietness of the hospital at Aix la Chapelle made
the previous period of activity seem a nightmare of incident.

I remember how surprise held me that I should be lying wounded in a
German hospital--I, a lieutenant in the Royal Flying Corps, who for
years before the war, had actually been a member of an Australian Peace
Society!

Zangwill's couplet had been to me a phrase of force:--

"To safeguard peace--we must prepare for war.
I know that maxim--it was forged in Hell!"

I remembered well how I had hung on the lips of Peace Advocate Doctor
Starr Jordan during his Australian visits, and how I had wondered at his
stories that Krupp's, Vicker's, and other great gun-building concerns
were financially operated by political, war-hatching syndicates; that
the curse of militarism was throttling human progression, and that the
doctrine of "non-resistance" was noble and Christianlike, for "all they
that take the sword shall perish by the sword."

I remembered how in Australia I had grieved that aviation, in which I
took a keen interest as a member of the Aerial League, was being
fostered for military purposes instead of for that glorious epoch
foretold by Tennyson:--

For I dipped into the future far as human eye could see,
Saw the vision of the world and all the wonders that would be,
Saw the heavens filled with commerce, Argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales.

I remembered I felt that the calm of commerce held far more glories than
the storm of war; that there was no nobler philosophy than:--

"Ye have heard it said, an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth;
but I say ... resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy
right cheek, turn to him the other also. If any man take thy coat,
let him have thy cloke also."

Then came the