The airdome at McMullen is small, flat and hard to land on without over-running. I made it by a miracle, and as I stalked into headquarters I was greeted by a very perspicacious and inquiring look from the good eye of Cap Kennard, our genial flight commander. “And did you enjoy yourself, ‘Slim’?” he inquired, while “Pop” Cravath, our superannuated adjutant, laughed raucously. “Temporarily,” I admitted. “Think you’re going to bed now, put icebags on your head and tomatoes in your stomach, and convalesce?” pursued Kennard, his scarred face holding a peculiar expression. He’s been in twenty-three airplane wrecks, and what he did to the ships was as nothing to what he had done to his face. Judging from photos of our stocky, chipper little C. O., he had joined the Air Service as a handsome young man with a face which could pass in a crowd on a dark night without sending any damsel into hysterics. After a couple of years in France and more time on the border, however, he looked as if he were breaking in a new pan for somebody else. “What’s up, Cap?” I demanded, being able to see through a ladder if some one lends me his glasses. “The chief’s got his bill through Congress, the bombing tests on those German battleships are going to take place this summer, and you, Slim, are ordered immediately to Langham Field, Virginia. You’re going in advance of the picked flyers who’ll drop the said bombs upon the bodies and persons of the Ostfriesland and other boats, and you’ve got to be out of here on the four o’clock train to San Antonio. Get under a cold shower, take some salts, drink a lot of icewater, pack the extra sock of yours, and may ---- have mercy on your soul!” II All of which more or less accounts for the fact that I, Slim Evans in person, was ensconced on the edge of Chesapeake Bay three days later. Langham Field is in the commonwealth of Virginia with the bay bounding one edge of it. All around it on the other sides there are marshes and estuaries and swamps and puddles and so forth. The mosquitoes have a formal review each night, and march and countermarch up and down any face within reach. Every once in a while there comes an order for them to take careful aim and fire. The first night I spent in the officers’ barracks I had no screens on my windows, and the mosquitoes were so thick that when I started to throw my shirt in a corner it just hung right in the air. Seriously speaking, I was in a very pleasant frame of mind at that, and I wouldn’t be far wrong if I said that just about every other flyer in the service was in a similar mental condition. Granting, of course, that any man who flies for a living has any mind at all to be in any condition whatever.