ris of his machine after a "crasher."

Where in the old West gunmen used to put a notch on their revolver
handle for every man killed, now in each aviator's record is the number
of enemy planes which he has brought down. When a Frenchman has ten his
name goes into the official bulletin. Everything contributes to urge on
the fighting aviator to more and more victims till one day he, too, is a
victim. Never were duels so detached or so intense. No clashing of
steel, no flecks of blood, only two men with wings. While the soldier
feels his weapon go home and the bomber sees his bomb in flight, the
aviator watches for his opponent to drop forward in his seat as the
first sign that he has lost control of his plane and of victory, and he
does not hear the passing of the bullets that answer those from his own
machine gun. One hero comes to take the place of another who has been
lost. A smiling English youth was embarrassed when asked how he brought
down the great Immelmann, most famous of German aviators.

Nelson's "Death or Westminster Abbey" has become paraphrased to "Death
or the _communique_." At twenty-one, while a general of division is
unknown except in the army an aviator's name may be the boast of a
nation. In him is expressed the national imagination, the sense of
hero-worship which people love to personify. The British aviation corps
stuck to anonymity until the giving of a Victoria Cross one day revealed
that Lieutenant Ball had brought down his twenty-sixth German plane.

Soon after the taking of Fort Douaumont when I was at Verdun, Beauchamp,
blond, blue-eyed and gentle of manner, who had thrilled all France by
bombing Essen, said, "Now they will expect me to go farther and do
something greater;" and I was not surprised to learn a month later that
he had been killed. Something in the way he spoke convinced me that he
foresaw death and accepted it as a matter of course; and he realized,
too, the penalty of being a hero. He had flown over Essen and dropped
his bombs and seen them burst, which was all of his story.

The public thrill over such exploits is the greater because of their
simplicity. An aviator has no experiences on the road; he cannot stop to
talk to anyone. There is flight; there is a lever that releases a bomb;
there is a machine gun. He may not indulge in psychology, which would be
wool-gathering, when every faculty is objectively occupied. He is
strangely helpless, a human being borne through space