(Next day.) We had been flying before breakfast. Beastly cold and very hungry, and we had drawn all the usual places blank. Brother Boche had too much sense to fly at an unearthly hour like that. We were getting rather bored with the whole show and annoyed with Archie’s attentions, when we spotted a machine four miles to the S.E. and so left our own patrol to give chase. It was a long way off and almost certainly an English machine. (It nearly always is, as the Huns know the look of our destroyers and usually avoid them assiduously, clearing off on sight.) However, we gave chase, just for luck, feeling bored; but as it got well over the German lines without getting Archied we got more interested. We had by then climbed to about 10,000 feet and had closed hardly at all, so we gave chase seriously, settling down to a steady 90 knots or more. After a few minutes we could see through glasses that she was a Hun Albatross biplane, going to their aerodrome, probably with information. She was doing about 60, so we gained, keeping above and behind her, where her pilot couldn’t very well see us, and we soon closed to about 200 yards. Then we dived suddenly with a swoop, which was a fine feeling, rather what one imagines a hawk must feel like, speed about 120 or 130 knots, and then opened fire on her starboard quarter at a range of about 50 yards. She was hit by the first burst of rapid fire, and bits of fabric and wood and metal flaked off. She dived and twisted, and her observer opened at us with an automatic pistol at about 25 yards range. We were both heeled over on one wing, and both diving and banking at the same time. It must have looked rather jolly from the floor. The wind pressure was appalling and nearly lifted the gunner clean out of our machine. Fritz’s observer’s bullets whistled close past our heads, which was good shooting on his part, ripping up part of the plane above us in a few places, but luckily neither of us was hit. A few seconds later we knocked the pistol out of his arm, and their pilot was also hit and probably killed, as the Albatross side-slipped, fell vertically, and turned over on its back, our craft rushing over it and missing it by a very few feet. The defeated German ’plane finally nose-dived the remaining two thousand feet or so, and smashed up completely on hitting the earth. We were still diving very fast indeed, and I succeeded in turning this into a slow spiral over the spot where the wrecked enemy lay, but we could see no movement at all, only a tangled mass of twisted wires, splintered wood, and torn fabric—all that remained of what a few minutes before had been a very fine specimen of engineering skill. We then straightened out our course and strolled home on a regular jack-snipe’s plan of flying, to avoid the guns, machine guns and rifles, which the Boches turned on to us from the floor as soon as there was no chance of their hitting their own machine. They loosed off quite a jolly