I was hurrying across the field towards the aeroplane, its fish-like tail bearing the black inscription "B 604/14," which I later came to know meant biplane number 604 of the year 1914. Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann was wishing me luck and in the same breath whispering admonitions to the grave aviator. I climbed up into the observer's compartment and found myself staring, first at the brown propeller blades only the length of the wagon in front of me, then at the brass petrol tank overhead, and the thick, curving celluloid shield behind, through which I could see the black sleeved arms of the aviator, moving towards the levers. I glanced down at Herrmann, who looked a little nervous I thought. Two soldiers were grasping the brown wings on my left. The brown propeller began to spin, lazily at first, then faster, while the engine that I could have reached forward and touched, began its roaring. A quick comparison between the observer's compartment of this machine, and the one in which I had sat at the Doeberitz Flugplatz near Berlin came to me--that one had the tiny, brass, bomb-dropping levers, two on each side of the rail; these were all in one line and on the left; that one had a writing shelf that fell out from the front wall of the tiny tonneau, so had this, and I touched the lever that brought the shelf sloping down towards my knees; the floor of that machine had seemed solid, though perhaps not, for this was cut to admit the insertion of an observing device which, protruding up between my knees, offered a lens on which the eyes might be cupped by a shield as on a Graflex camera. I was wondering if four bombs dangled from the four releasing hooks below, when the engine started, smiting my ears with a mad roaring, and driving cold air against my face. I remembered to pull down my goggles and the next moment I felt a shudder run the length of the machine as it lurched forward, running over the field, to rise slightly, bump gently on its rubbered wheels, and then gliding upward on a gradual slant, sail towards the willows, dead sentinels grotesquely standing at the far end of the field with their shrapnel-torn branches dangling against the gray-ringed dreariness of sky.