The greatest of British airmen, the late Captain Ball, V.C., D.S.O., told of a contest in which he and a German both exhausted their machine-gun ammunition without serious injury to either; and then, after having done their best to kill each other, they sailed along side by side, laughing one at the other, till they parted company with a friendly wave of the hand to return to their own lines. It was not uncommon, in the early part of the war, when one of our men was brought down behind the German lines, for the Germans on the following day to fly over our lines and to drop a note telling us that Lieutenant Blank had been killed in a fight on the previous day, and had been buried behind their trenches with all military honors. Needless to say our airmen displayed the same courtesy toward their opponents. The knowledge thus given often saved that depressing uncertainty on the part of the missing hero's relations and friends, which is more disheartening than the knowledge of his death. Personal bravery is not the monopoly of any one nation. The airmen of our brave French, Belgian, Italian, or Russian allies require no praise from my feeble pen; and those of us who have been out there have seen too many incidents of the courage of our enemies to belittle them, and we have no desire to do so. They have often been barbarous in their uncalled-for cruelties and outrageous in their acts, but they have been sometimes brave, careless of death, and chivalrous. On one occasion I saw a German airman fly so low over our lines from the front to the rear that we could see him leaning out over the side and looking down at us in the trenches. Some companies of infantry in the front lines raised their rifles and peppered away at him. But he carelessly flew on toward the rear where a company of pioneers were digging trenches; and so struck were they at this reckless trick that they pulled off their helmets, and swinging them in the air, they cheered him. Another instance of British--Canadian in this case--love of any brave act! The annals of our British air service are so crowded with tales of heroic deeds that they seem almost to dwarf the heroism shown in the infantry, artillery, or naval branches of our forces. Many stories worthy of the classic heroes are yet untold of boys twenty-one or twenty-two years old who grappled with their enemies in the clouds with the same undaunted fearlessness displayed by Horatius at the bridge in the brave days of old. CHAPTER XV STAFF OFFICERS