that was moving--the surf.

Soldiers who were returning from leave in the regular way were having a
jumpy passage, as one knew by the whitecaps that looked like tiny white
flowers on a pewter cloth; only if you looked steadily at one it
disappeared and others appeared in its place. Otherwise, the channel in
a heavy sea was as still as a painted ocean with painted ships which,
however fast they were moving, were making no headway to us traveling as
smoothly in our 'bus as a motor boat on a glassy lake.

I looked at my watch as we crossed the lace edging on the English side
and again as we crossed it on the French side. The time elapsed was
seventeen and a half minutes, which is not rapid going, even for the
broader part of the channel which we chose. The fastest plane, I am
told, has made it at the narrowest point in eight and a half minutes.
Not going as high as usual, the pilot did not speed his motor, as the
lower the altitude the more uncomfortable might be the result of engine
trouble to his passenger.

Now, however, we were rising midway of the crossing into the gray bank
overhead; one second the channel floor was there and the next it was
not. Underneath us was mist and ahead and behind and above us only mist,
soft and cool against the face. We were wholly out of sight of land and
water, above the clouds, detached from earth, lost in the sky between
England and France.

This was the great moment to me. I was away from the sound of the guns;
from the headlines of newspapers announcing the latest official
bulletins; from prisoners' camps and casualty clearing stations; from
dugouts and trenches and the Ridge. Here was real peace, the peace of
the infinite--and no one could ask you when you thought the war would be
over. You were nobody, yet again you were the whole population of the
world, you and the aviator and the plane, perfectly helpless in one
sense and in another gloriously secure. Even he seemed a part of the
machine carrying you swiftly on, without any sense of speed except the
driving freshness of the air in your face. I felt that I should not mind
going on forever. Time was unlimited. There was only space and the
humming of the motor and the faintly gleaming circle of light of the
propeller and those two rigid wings with their tracery of braces.

We were not long out of sight of land and water, but long enough to make
one wish to fly over the channel again, the next time at ten thousand
feet, when it