g nothing. At the point where they
ended, I redressed and put on my motor. My altimeter registered two
thousand metres. By a curious chance, while searching the empty sky, I
saw a live shell passing through the air. It was just at the second
when it reached the top of its trajectory and started to fall. "Lord!"
I thought, "I have seen a shell, and yet I can't find my patrol!"

While coming down I had given no attention to my direction. I had lost
twenty-five hundred metres in height. The trenches were now plainly
visible, and the brown strip of sterile country where they lay was
vastly broader. Several times I felt the concussion of shell
explosions, my machine being lifted and then dropped gently with an
uneasy motion. Constantly searching the air, I gave no thought to my
position with reference to the lines, nor to the possibility of
anti-aircraft fire. Talbott had said: "Never fly in a straight line
for more than fifteen seconds. Keep changing your direction
constantly, but be careful not to fly in a regularly irregular
fashion. The German gunners may let you alone at first, hoping that
you will become careless, or they may be plotting out your style of
flight. Then they make their calculations and they let you have it. If
you have been careless, they'll put 'em so close, there'll be no
question about the kind of a scare you will have."

There wasn't in my case. I was looking for my patrol to the exclusion
of thought of anything else. The first shell burst so close that I
lost control of my machine for a moment. Three others followed, two in
front, and one behind, which I believed had wrecked my tail. They
burst with a terrific rending sound in clouds of coal-black smoke. A
few days before I had been watching without emotion the bombardment of
a German plane. I had seen it twisting and turning through the
_eclatements_, and had heard the shells popping faintly, with a sound
like the bursting of seed-pods in the sun.

My feeling was not that of fear, exactly. It was more like despair.
Every airman must have known it at one time or another, a sudden
overwhelming realization of the pitilessness of the forces which men
let loose in war. In that moment one doesn't remember that men have
loosed them. He is alone, and he sees the face of an utterly evil
thing. Miller's advice was, "Think down to the gunners"; but this is
impossible at first. Once a French captain told me that he talked to
the shells. "I say, 'Bonjour, mo