Sammie was always philosophical. He was once ordered to take a new machine on a very long raid. We had all examined this new aeroplane and declared it a "dud"; so we cheered Sammie up as well as we could by drinking his health and inquiring into his taste in flowers. Undismayed, Sammie took the machine off the ground, with the wheel held into his stomach; the rigging of the machine was such that it would fly on an even plane longitudinally if the wheel was kept back as far as possible. By all the laws of aeronautics this aeroplane should have crashed before leaving the ground, but it did not. Sammie climbed it to five hundred feet in an hour and a half. As Sammie now had seven and one half hours petrol left and was still four hours away from his objective, it would have been quite justifiable for him to return without going any farther; in fact, it was the only reasonable thing for him to do; but Sammie always trusted to luck rather than reason, and his luck did not fail him. One engine "conked" and he was forced to turn back. He fired his forced landing signal when approaching the aerodrome, but the aerodrome was being bombed by the Huns in a very thorough manner and Sammie had to land in complete darkness, the inevitable result being a crash. Sammie extricated himself from the wreckage, found that both of his companions were dead, rescued one of the machine guns from its damaged mounting, together with several drums of ammunition and practised his marksmanship on the enemy planes until an enemy bomb ruined his clothes and left him, after a few months in the hospital, minus an arm. III There was "Jock," a "wee bonnie laddie," from the south of Scotland. He stood five feet three inches tall when wearing field boots with exceptionally high heels, but that did not prevent him from braining a Hun with the Hun's own wrench some sixty miles back of the enemy's front lines, and this is how it happened.