Very curious is the psychology of the airman. He is billeted so often in the midst of the world in some pleasant little town away behind the lines—it may be even Paris; sometimes also Fate sends him to a château where he lives like a prince amid ancestral halls and a sweeping park—until the day when duty calls him to mount the perilous stairway of the skies to give mortal combat to the enemy. In the trenches men welcome an attack as a relief from the deadly monotony of life in pits, but the airman leaves an easeful, agreeable, social life for the cold, austere atmosphere of the skies under the pure radiant dome of heaven. It requires a man of special temperament to withstand so lively a contrast—not to be softened or unnerved by it. Think of the solitude of the upper air, careering absolutely alone, perhaps. And there is no turning back. There is no such word as "funk" in the bright lexicon of the airman. He is up there because he is fearless, because he does not dread being solus in the wide heavens, because he is a man and no craven, because he has nerves of steel and whipcord. And he must be ready to fight with any weapons. Garros was equally expert in attacking and bringing down his man with machine-gun, carbine, rifle, or even revolver, and in ten days before he was captured he had "grassed" three German aeroplanes. One of the men who fell into his hands having asked him to announce his capture to the German lines, Garros started off in that spirit of chivalry common amongst airmen. There is this delightful about the new arm, it has given a touch of romance to the drab horror of the war. Whenever a man was captured or killed, airmen from the opposite camp dropped a letter informing the comrades of the victim, often with an added word of praise. "Even the Germans are gentlemen in the air," remarked a young pilot the other day. There is chivalry in the air. The man with his head near the stars, flying in immeasurable space, has no room for littlenesses. His heart is large and splendid like the splendour of his deeds—deeds that make the exploits of the old heroes pale into insignificance. They are the phenomenal fruit of a limitless audacity, of a glorious and spring-like youth, of the heyday of existence, when danger is the mad intoxicant, the heady draught that puts brightness into the eye, that gives a riotous pleasure to life, that is like song and wine to the hero clad in the shining and invincible armour of his own superlative freshness and illusions. The bodies that crash down from the heavens and the souls that soar into the white radiance of Eternity have known no petty thought, have perpetrated no mean deed. Yes, there is chivalry in the Air. *CHAPTER XX* *THE POILU’S HOSPITAL*