“Do you remember Brander? We brought him over once or twice. He was a mighty decent sort of fellow. Somehow, though, I hated his being such friends with Esmè, I’d been his only one for so long, you see. Brander was born in India, and somehow Esmè found it out; from hearing him curse in a dialect, I think. They used to talk some unheard-of jargon to each other and enjoyed it. “Well, one day Brander got smashed in a fight up the lines, along the British front, and was dying. He kept asking for Esmè, calling his name, and when Esmè got word of it, of course he started at once. He took one of the baby Nieuports; they’re fast, and not much of a target from below. He knew the Germans had a masked battery which he’d have to cross. “I thought I’d like to see him across the enemy country, so I let him get a good start, and then I went up. I lost sight of him in a cloud-bank, and must have flown beyond him, for when I cleared it, he was behind and below me, and coming toward him a big German fighting-plane. “Esmè’s wasn’t a fighting-machine, and he should have tried to get away; but he must have seen the German a second after I did and judged it too late. He fired his revolver once, then suddenly seemed to lose control of his machine, and dropped to the level of the other. He must have thought he was done for and made his decision on the instant, counting it better to try to ram the German plane and go down to death together than to take the millionth chance of landing and let the enemy escape. He went head on at the other, and they fell, woven as one machine, just inside the German lines. “Somehow I got back to our fellows; God knows I wish I hadn’t. “Every man in our escadrille paid in his own way unconscious tribute to Esmè’s memory. We were awfully and justly proud of him,—it’s something to have died for France,—but for all of us the fun, the excitement, of the work had gone, been snuffed out. No one turned corkscrew somersaults, Esmè’s great stunt; no one did any of his special tricks any more, not even to show off before the new men. “We got one of those French immortelle wreaths, tied to it his name and the number of the machine he was driving and dropped it inside their lines. The next morning just at sunrise one of their men flew over our hangars and threw down a stone. Painted on it in German was, ‘Your dead sends thanks’! That’s just like them, brutal, and the last word on their side. “There’s always work to be done in war, each day’s effort to be made, and the mercy of constant doing helped me. I used to try to forget the fighting and the horrors and go back to the old days.