Among other things, I learnt how to fly, at Luxeuil, and found it very much like learning to ride a bicycle. It has the same fascination and the same characteristics. You have the same certainty, to begin with, that you will never be able to do it; you know the same triumph of achievement when you fly ten yards alone; and when you are flying along smoothly in complete confidence that the instructor is holding the controls and is checking you the whole time, you turn round, see he is looking over the side, become overtaken with nervousness, and dive and climb, and slip and slew, in a fever of anxiety and dread. The advantage of being able to fly yourself is that if you feel depressed and weary of the ground, and of the people on it, you can get a book, jump into an aeroplane, and shoot up into the solitude of the sky. When you have climbed three or four thousand feet you can bring out your book, and go round and round in great circles far away from the earth in utter seclusion, reading sublime verse, and dreaming of any unreality you desire. The tranquillity of these days was ended suddenly by a rather welcome order to proceed to the advanced base at Ochey-les-Bains, near Nancy, from which raids were to be carried out at once. Over miles of ravine and forest, over Plombières and Remirémont and Epinal, over winding river and rolling down, we flew till we approached the region of Nancy, where a few kite-balloons hanging above the haze showed us that we were near the lines. We landed on the wide French aerodrome, and once again met a crowd of English officers in a strange corner of France. We began to prepare at once for a night raid on some blast-furnaces beyond Metz. My pilot and I had never flown before at night, and had never crossed the lines. With mingled trepidation and excitement we awaited the first voyage amidst the darkness and the stars beyond the frontier of Alsace into what was then Germany--with its unknown dangers and its unknown difficulties. III. THE FIRST RAID. "Around me broods the dim mysterious Night, Star-lit and still. No whisper comes across the Plain." --_The Night Raid._ Night! Before I knew I was to fly through the darkness over the country of the enemy; night had been for me a time of soft withdrawal from the world--a time of quiet. It still held its old childhood mystery of a vague oblivion between day and day, an unusual space of time peopled by slumberous dreams in the gloom of a warm, familiar bed.