The tragedies of Gallipoli and Belgium I had been through had not impaired me in any degree. Shell-shock had not shattered my nerves, physically I was in the best of shape and tests of my vision met all requirements. You can wager though that I said several prayers during my practice flights. Once you got up in the air, however, there would come over you an amazing confidence in the trustworthiness of the fragile planes and the roaring motor. The darts, loops, banks and volplaning that had at first turned me somewhat dizzy, I found myself getting used to. And there’s another thing about flying. It’s when you get ’way up. The further up you go, the less you think about falling. Or if you do the vastness of the upper regions simply takes all thoughts of self-importance out of a man. You are such a midget in the immensity after all. And you find yourself figuring, “Well, suppose I do drop? What a small thing I am anyway in this great world.” And it sets you thinking of the millions of men who have died in the great cause and to wondering why you should imagine you must of necessity be one of the lucky ones to escape. Flying would even take the “swank” out of the Kaiser or his booby-faced son. For all that, however, there was one time in every flight when I held my breath--when I never quite got over being scared. That was the landing. The observation machine we had, while not so fast as some of the fighting flyers, was nevertheless capable of about one hundred miles an hour. When you are going at that pace, you swallow a lot of wind whenever you attempt to talk or rather shout. In machines of that speed, as the reader is probably informed, they begin to drop as soon as the pace goes under sixty miles an hour. That means you have to make your landing at a whooping, whizzing speed, and if you are forced to a landing away from your station and on rough ground, there will usually be bruises in the adventure for you at least. Lord bless me! But the earth would suddenly seem to be coming up at you fast--at express-train speed. Even the flyer will admit to you that it is the hardest, most nerve-racking feature of his nervous job. Just when you bring the wheels of the machine on a level with the ground there must be a swift upward turn--it is a ticklish proceeding, requiring “feel” as much as scientific knowledge of the levers, and if you don’t do the thing rightly, your plane will balk viciously, jabbing its nose into the ground, rearing, probably somersaulting, possibly smashing itself and you, too.