llow, that! I hope we kill him soon. The airmen say
he is a Frenchman, but my guess is that he is English." And then he went
on reading.

Getting back to the afternoon before, I must add that it was not a bomb
which the flying man threw into the edge of the woods. He had a
surprise for his German adversaries that day. Soon after we left the
stand of the field guns a civilian Red Cross man halted our machines to
show us a new device for killing men. It was a steel dart, of the
length and thickness of a fountain pen, and of much the same aspect. It
was pointed like a needle at one end, and at the other was fashioned
into a tiny rudder arrangement, the purpose of this being to hold it
upright---point downward--as it descended. It was an innocent-looking
device--that dart; but it was deadlier than it seemed.

"That flyer at whom our guns were firing a while ago dropped this,"
explained the civilian. "He pitched out a bomb that must have contained
hundreds of these darts; and the bomb was timed to explode a thousand or
more feet above the earth and scatter the darts. Some of them fell into
a cavalry troop on the road leading to La Fere.

"Hurt anyone? Ach, but yes! Hurt many and killed several--both men and
horses. One dart hit a trooper on top of his head. It went through his
helmet, through his skull, his brain, his neck, his body, his leg--all
the way through him lengthwise it went. It came out of his leg, split
open his horse's flank, and stuck in the hard road.

"I myself saw the man afterward. He died so quickly that his hand still
held his bridle rein after he fell from the saddle; and the horse
dragged him--his corpse, rather--many feet before the fingers relaxed."

The officers who were with us were tremendously interested--not
interested, mind you, in the death of that trooper, spitted from the
heavens by a steel pencil, but interested in the thing that had done the
work. It was the first dart they had seen. Indeed, I think until then
this weapon had not been used against the Germans in this particular
area of the western theater of war. These officers passed it about,
fingering it in turn, and commenting on the design of it and the
possibilities of its use.

"Typically French," the senior of them said at length, handing it back
to its owner, the Red Cross man--"a very clever idea too; but it might
be bettered, I think." He pondered a moment, then added, with the racial
complacence that belongs