“The meeting with the shell was merely one of those freak experiences that might happen to any one, or, just as well, never happen at all. It was during the time I am speaking of that the Germans were amusing themselves by a long-distance bombardment of N---- with their biggest guns, and we--(I had an observation officer along, a chap named K----, whom you may have heard of as a long-distance runner)--simply chanced to meander into the path of one shell somewhere about the last quarter of its trajectory. Watching from a distance, you can always see one of these brutes go hurtling along, but this one we only heard,--and felt,--and it was like two express trains, going in opposite directions, passing at full speed. There was a strange soft sort of a buzz, growing into a rushing roar inside of two or three seconds, a blow from a solid wall of air that was like colliding with the side of a house, and then, for two or three minutes, a series of bumps like going over a corduroy road in a springless cart. “I don’t know whether we interfered very much with the course of that shell, but the shell pretty nearly brought _our_ flight to an end then and there. Only the fact that we met the first big rush of air head-on saved us. I wouldn’t have had one chance in a thousand of ‘correcting’ if it had caught us sideways--and even as it was, the machine, in spite of its seventy-miles-an-hour headway, was stood up on its rudder like a rearing horse. After that first ‘collision,’ our fluttering flight down the wake of the ‘42’ was only ‘queer,’ but withal a different sensation from anything I had ever experienced. “I have no idea how close we passed to each-other. My impression of the moment was that the distance was inside of fifty yards, though it was doubtless really much greater. We were not, of course, going in exactly opposite directions, for the shell must have been coming down at a considerably greater angle than that at which we were going up. Yet the ‘aerial surf’ stirred up by the passage of the Hun’s little messenger of goodwill in that smooth stretch of atmosphere was heavy and persistent enough to keep my machine wallowing for over a mile.