A few days later Horne called me up to ask me to dine with him that evening at a famous old restaurant in the Strand. “‘S----’s’ is a bit more ‘merry and bright’ than this old tomb of a Club,” he said, “and a few of the Flying Corps chaps who are in the habit of rendezvousing there while in London on leave you’ll find well worth knowing.” The gathering was even more informal than I had anticipated. One of the long tables, it appeared, was set aside for “R.F.C.” officers and their friends, and these dropped in by twos and threes, as suited their convenience, all the way from seven to ten o’clock. There were half-a-dozen men at the table when Horne and I entered, and all of these--they had stalls for a new “revue”--presently took their leave. One of the group was a South African, one a New Zealander, and two Australians. The latter we found bent over the racing page of the Sydney _Bulletin_, while the New Zealander was evidently trying to persuade the Africander that a dairy herd near Wellington offered better prospects than a general farm in Rhodesia. One of the Australians, whose family was interested in an importing house, lingered behind a moment to ask me if I thought the war was going to force up the price of American agricultural machinery in foreign markets. None of them said a word about flying, and Horne volunteered no more than that they were all “good men--that little chap from New Zealand really ‘topping.’” Horne, with the fleshpots of Argentina in his mind, ordered solidly and lengthily, and three or four more officers had “wolfed” hasty meals of roast beef and whisky-and-soda before our _Chateaubriand_ (which represents the nearest Anglo-French equivalent to the _carne asado_ of the Pampas) had been done to its proper turn over the coals. These, like the others, rattled on about the music-halls, the homeland, the “rotten London weather”--anything and everything, in fact, save the war in general and the war in the air in particular. One, it is true,--he had come from France only that afternoon,--in accounting for a bandaged hand, did mention something about getting a finger jammed under the belt of his machine-gun; but it seemed to occur to no one to inquire what he had been shooting at, or whether or not he had hit it, or any of a dozen or so other things concerning which I, for one, was at once consumed with interest.