There had been a time when it had jumped in every fibre of his soul. He had been a cadet officer then, with only twelve solo hours in the air, under the old rough-and-tumble system of learning to fly. Spinning at that time was an unsolved mystery to him, a ghastly mystery that had meant quick death in a welter of blood, flecked with splinters. Fred McCloud had gone that way, and Johnny Archamboult. For weeks afterward, Johnny’s screams had rung in his ears like a stab of pain, until the mere smell of petrol and fabric dope made the fear crawl into his throat and strangle him. Somehow he had kept on with the rest, under the merciless scourge that lashed one on to fly--and the worse fear of seeing cold scorn in the eyes of the men who taught the lore of thin cloud miles. The tender twisted and dodged along the hard mud ribbon that ran like a badly healed cicatrix across the pock-scarred face of the fields. Gnarled and bleak, they were fields that had held the weight of blood-crazed men--still held them in unmarked graves, where they had fallen the year before under the steel flail. He had heard stories from his older brother about those fields--the laughing brother who had gone away one day and returned months later without his laugh, only to go away again, not to come back. He had seen pictures in the magazines----But somehow no one had caught their utter bleakness as he saw it now. The riven boles of two obscene trees crouched and argued about it on the lead-gray horizon, tossing their splintered arms and shrieking, he fancied, like quarrelling old women in the lesser streets of a village. Close to the roadway, there were a torn shoe and a tin hat flattened like a crushed derby. Poor relics that even salvage could see no further use in. Farther off, a splintered caisson pointed three spokes of a shattered wheel to the sky, like a mutilated hand thrown out in agony. He was seeing it for himself now. No one could smile at the cleanness of his uniform again and say, “Wait till you get out. When I was in France----” He was out himself now. In a day or so he would go over the line with loaded guns. His instructors at the training ’drome--thin-jawed men with soiled ribbons under their wings--had done no more, and some of them had done less. The thought braced him somewhat. They had seemed so different--so impossible to imitate--those men. Their war had always been a different one from his; a war peopled with vague, fearless men like Rhodes-Moorehouse and Albert Ball and Bishop, the Canadian; men who flew without a thought for themselves.