In one of his letters Lieutenant Rosher describes thus how he came through a curtain of fire: ‘I found myself across the yards and felt a mild sort of surprise. My eyes must have been sticking out of my head like a shrimp’s! I know I was gasping for breath, and crouching down in the fuselage.’ He was too brave a man to be afraid of admitting that he was afraid. Later in the book there is a story like a nightmare of how, when he went to attack an airship shed at Brussels, he was instead chased by a Zeppelin, which was already in the air when he got there, and so high up that his old machine could not reach it: the machine was, in fact, barely able to go fast enough to keep out of the way of the airship. Lieutenant Rosher, although highly imaginative and impressionable, was, as we have seen, of the ‘stuff’ of which heroes are made. All who knew him join in acclaiming him a young officer of heroic mettle. CHAPTER XXIII AN OBSERVER IN THE R.N.A.S. Further light is thrown on the work of naval pilots by an observer writing in the _Border Telegraph_. ‘Most of us know,’ he says, ‘what the pilot of an aeroplane does. But have we as true a conception of the observer’s duties? The man who makes his mark nowadays is the specialist. There are first-rate aeroplane observers and first-rate seaplane observers. Common-sense plays a great part in the affairs of both. Any man may recognize a haystack from a moderate altitude, but how many can tell a topsail schooner from a barquentine, a flotilla leader from a light cruiser, or a German ship of the line from one of the Entente? Therein lies the secret.’