“Those Germans are bringing up ammunition reinforcements for the battle,” I assumed. “They must be stopped!” The ammunition was soup. I called Kennedy, pointed them out to him, and told him my assumption. Without waiting for a signal, he dived like the winged messenger of fate. Kennedy had been trained with the English Pursuit Pilots and he was handling that big, slow, lumbering A.R. like a little fighting scout. We came out of that dive with a quivering groan, and Kennedy, at about one hundred meters altitude, began to circle over that communicating trench, waiting for me to halt the procession. He was too fast for me, but when I finally got my heart gauged down a bit, and my Adam’s apple released from its strangle hold on my windpipe, I began to make my final estimate of the situation. The Heinies had stopped and were eyeing us like country boys at their first circus. It was easy. All I had to do was to pull the triggers, for my guns were directly on them and the enemy reinforcements would never reach its intended destination. They could not scatter—they were rats in my trap. Then an intensely human appeal struck me—poor, belated, unfortunate Heinies—they were not my personal enemies, and if I pulled the triggers it would be little short of murder. To balance this was another series of thought—they were enemies of my country—of the United States—and, if I allowed them to live, would probably kill many of our own brave doughboys; perhaps they belonged to machine gun squads; perhaps it was they who had killed my pals, Angel and Emerson, a few days before. Such were my thoughts when suddenly, Spiff! Spang! and two bullets went between me and the gasoline tank, tearing a hole in the top plate. Spiff!!! Another went through the fuselage, smashing into bits, my hard-rubber wireless reel. It was no time to indulge in psychological deductions—I realized that I was being fired at from the ground, and like my lumbering old A.R., I was about to pass from obsolescence to obsolete. The application of proper psychology indicated that since I was being fired at, the war between the United States and Germany had not ended and below me was the enemy. I was conscious of something within calling me to “Do my duty!” I did. The bullets began to sing at the rate of six hundred per minute, and my tracer bullets did not betray me. They were finding their mark. Measured by the standard that an Ace is one who gets five or more Boche, I became an Ace in a day—and also the first American Ace. However, strangely enough, when my friends to-day ask me, “How many boche did you get?” I can truthfully say, “Between seventy-five and a hundred,” but when they say, “How many boche planes did you shoot down?” I have to renig for I am not an Ace.