"I remember as we 'taxied' over the aerodrome that the roar of the engine on each side of me, the flashing of lights, the other machines as they passed us or waited with slowly 'ticking-over props' for us to pass, the different-colored lights which were being fired down from machines already in the air and the lights fired up from the ground, all combined and whirled through my excited brain like a meaningless nightmare. Then there was a deafening roar and we shot down a path of light, bumped hard, bumped less hard, bumped again, and the huge plane with its great load of bombs was in the air. Lights on the ground and the lights of machines in the air became mixed until I could not tell one from the other. "As we rose higher and higher, ground lights far off in the distance came hurtling toward us like the navigation lights of a fast approaching machine; I would clutch Jack, yell, and point out the lights in order to avoid a collision as it seemed to me; Jack would grin, pull me down on the seat beside him, and tell me the lights were on the ground and at least ten miles away. Gradually I got control of myself and tried to find the aerodrome we had just left; it was nowhere to be seen. There was a network of white threads on a black background, an occasional winding silver ribbon with here and there a silver blotch and queer-shaped blacker blacknesses on the general blackness; these were roads, rivers, lakes, and woods as they looked from the air at night. "How long we had been in the air I don't know. Time seemed nothing, or an eternity. We were suspended in a sphere. Lights or stars rushed at us or receded or whirled about. Time and distance became mere words without meaning and I had fallen into a state resembling hypnotic sleep when suddenly roused by Jack. 'There are the lines,' he shouted, and as far as the eye could see, to left and right, out of the darkness beneath us were the constant flashes of the never silent guns of the Flanders front. Every now and then we got a sudden 'bump' as a shell passed near us. I had fallen into an almost semiconscious state when 'tut-tut-tut-tut-tut' jumped me off my seat; I realized that I was surrounded by a dazzling whiteness; the machine itself was brilliant. Amidst the 'tut-tut-tut' of our own machine guns shooting down at the searchlights there was a constant dull 'whonk,' 'whonk,' 'whonk,' and the whole machine seemed to be enveloped in puffs of black smoke as the anti-aircraft batteries found the range.