"Crashed," burst in Blanky. "My sainted sacred aunt. Another fellow walking in his sleep and killing criss-cross Huns in his dithering dreams. Any imagining more of you get a fabulous freak Hun?" The Diver said mildly, "Yes," he'd got one--not counting the one between him and Tom, which might have been either's. Blanky was beginning again, when the Major stopped him. "This is getting too complicated," he said. "Let's get the lot together--observers and all--and see if we can make anything of this business." A babble of voices was heard outside, the door banged open, and in jostled another batch of pilots and observers talking at the pitch of their voices, laughing, shouting questioning, answering, trampling their heavy flying boots noisily on the bare wood floor, turning the little office hut into a regular bear-garden. Their leather coats were unbuttoned and flapping, their long boots hung wrinkled about their knees or were pulled thigh-high, scarves swathed their throats or dangled down their chests, enormous furry gauntletted gloves hid their hands. Some still wore their leather helmets with goggles pushed up over their foreheads; others had taken them off, and looked like some strange pantomime monsters with funnily disproportionate faces and heads emerging from the huge leather collars. For minutes the room was a hopeless bedlam of noise. Everyone talked at once: all, slightly deaf perhaps from the long-endured roar of the engines, and rush of the wind, talked their loudest. They compared notes of flashing incidents seen for a fraction of a second in the fighting, tried to piece together each others' seeings and doings, told what had happened to them and their engines and machines, asked questions, and, without waiting for an answer, asked another, or answered somebody else's. The voice of Blanky haranguing some of the last-comers, calling down curses on their misdeeds, rose through any break in the hubbub. The Major sat for some minutes listening to the uproar, catching beginnings and middles and loose ends of sentences here and there from one or another: "Gave him a good half drum." ... "Shot away my left aileron control." ... "Went hare-ing off over Hunland at his hardest." ... "Pulled everything in sight and pushed the others, but couldn't get her straightened." ... "A two-inch tear in my radiator, an' spoutin' steam like an old steam laundry." ... And then the voice of Blanky spitting oaths and "It was the rottenest formation I ever saw, abso-blanky-lutely _rotten_." His sentence was swamped again in the flood of talk and fragments of sentences. "Then it jammed--number three stoppage and" ... "yellin' myself black in the face, but couldn't make him hear." ... "I hate those filthy explosive bullets of theirs." ... "Chucked her into a spin." ... "Missing every other stroke, fizzing and spitting like a crazy Tom cat." ... "I ask you now, I _ask_ you what could I do?" ... "Down flamin' like a disembowelled volcano."