I switch on my torch and shine it on to the two engines, to see whether the sinister white scarves of steam and water are sweeping back from the top of the radiators. Fortunately, to-night the engines are working splendidly. If either engine were to be boiling, after one or two efforts to prevent it, the pilot would land the machine at once. If not, disaster would probably follow, as it did during my last terrible raid. For a while, as ever, I am a little nervous of looking below. I prefer to hunch myself inside the big collar of my overall suit, and to make continual adjustments of the petrol pressure, which is recorded on two little dials whose pointers move slowly forwards or backwards in accordance with my opening of the release or the pressure tap. A thin pencil of light flashes upwards from the coast-line east of Dunkerque. Four times it flashes--long, long, short, long. It goes out, and one is conscious of the town wrinkling its forehead, listening intently, uneasy, wondering. Again the searchlight stabs the sky four times and goes out. "Challenging some one at Dunkerque!" I remark to the pilot. "Expect it is a Hun. We had better keep well clear of it!" A third time the searchlight throws upwards its anxious inquiry, and this time, still receiving no answer, it is not extinguished but moves across the sky hesitatingly, nervously. Flashes leap up from the ground at several places round the town. In a few seconds the red sharp spurts of the bursting shells appear suddenly in half a dozen places across the sky. "Barrage!" mutters the pilot. "We'd better get clear away or we'll get bothered. Here we are! They're shelling us! Fire! _Fire!_ We're only two thousand up!" I hurriedly push a green cartridge into the Very's light pistol and pull the trigger. The explosion barks out, and a green globe of light drifts below us. The shells, which had been bursting unpleasantly near us, now, to our great relief, cease. "Surely they can see our navigation lights! It's no good! We will have to get height somewhere else!" grumbles the pilot, turning the machine away. We fly over to a "blind spot," and, climbing in great circles, see our height indicator record in turn, three, four, and then five thousand feet. "Let's push off now!" says the pilot. "We're high enough!" "Make it five thousand five hundred, old man! The wind is with us the whole way! We want to be at six before we cross the lines if we are to get up to nine by Bruges." The patient pilot makes one more wide turn and then faces east, and flies ahead on a direct course.