“These operations,” he states, “were repeated several times with a slight variation in the way I looped over him (flying against a head wind). When he was about 150 yards behind me, I looped straight over him, and coming out of the loop dived at him and fired a good long burst. I saw nearly all the bullets go into the pilot’s back, just on the edge of the cockpit. He immediately dived straight into the ground. “I then went over the German trenches filled with soldiers, and was fired on by machine guns, rifles, and small field guns, in or out” (Ye Gods and Little Fishes!) “of range. There were many shells bursting in and about the German trenches.” The report concluded with estimates of the strength of various bodies of infantry and cavalry, movements of convoy and artillery noticed during the intervals between aerial somersaults. The pilot landed at the first aerodrome he saw--adding, in explanation of such an irregular proceeding, that his machine was badly shot about. The squadrons co-operating with the R.F.C. commenced by faithfully recording all aerial combats in which their machines were engaged. But after a while such events became too commonplace to chronicle. They fought from dawn to dusk, generally a day’s journey for a horse behind the German lines. They fought at altitudes at which in spring a thermometer registered 50° of frost, returning with petrol tanks frozen, and hands and feet and ears swollen by frost-nip. One squadron had a hundred decisive fights in a month (omitting skirmishes), and accounted for twenty-five Boche machines. Its log (unofficially termed “Game-book”) contained such entries as the following: “Four machines went up: managed to bag five Huns before breakfast.” For the first time in their lives the pilots got all the fighting they wanted, and revelled in it gluttonously. They grew fine-drawn, with the accentuated brilliancy of eye common to men in perfect condition living at the highest tension. They met Winged Death hourly in the blue loneliness above the clouds; the rustle of his sable wings became a sound familiar as the drone of their own engines, so that all terror of the Destroyer passed out of their souls--if indeed it had ever entered there. And Death in his turn grew merciful, amazed. At least this is the only explanation to offer for certain tales that are told along the Front, where the White Ensign flies. But hear for yourselves and judge.