n fact so far back that they are near our bus. The German battery
notices this, and we are forthwith bracketed in front and behind. We
swoop away in a second, and escape with nothing worse than a violent
stagger, and we are thrown upward as a shell bursts close underneath.

But we soon shake off the Archie group immediately behind the lines.
Freed from the immediate necessity of shell-dodging, the
flight-commander leads his covey around the particular hostile preserve
marked out for his attention. Each pilot and each observer twists his
neck as if it were made of rubber, looking above, below, and all around.
Only thus can one guard against surprise and yet surprise strangers, and
avoid being surprised oneself. An airman new to active service often
finds difficulty in acquiring the necessary intuitive vision which
attracts his eyes instinctively to hostile craft. If his machine
straggles, and he has not this sixth sense, he will sometimes hear the
rattle of a mysterious machine-gun, or even the phut of a bullet, before
he sees the swift scout that has swooped down from nowhere.

There is a moment of excitement when the flight-commander spots three
machines two thousand feet below. Are they Huns? His observer uses
field-glasses, and sees black crosses on the wings. The signal to attack
is fired, and we follow the leader into a steep dive.

With nerves taut and every faculty concentrated on getting near enough
to shoot, and then shooting quickly but calmly, we have no time to
analyse the sensations of that dive. We may feel the tremendous pressure
hemming us in when we try to lean over the side, but otherwise all we
realise is that the wind is whistling past the strained wires, that our
guns must be ready for instant use, and that down below are some
enemies.

The flight-commander, his machine aimed dead at the leading German,
follows the enemy trio down, down, as they apparently seek to escape by
going ever lower. He is almost near enough for some shooting, when the
Huns dive steeply, with the evident intention of landing on a near-by
aerodrome. One of them fires a light as he goes, and--enter the villain
Archibald to loud music. A ter-rap!

Our old friend Archie has been lying in wait with guns set for a certain
height, to which his three decoy birds have led us. There crashes a
discord of shell-bursts as we pull our machines out of the dive and
swerve away. The last machine to leave the unhealthy patch of air is
pu