The road along which we drove to reach the first pair of sheds to be visited ran through extensive plantations of scraggly screw-pine, which appear to have been set--before the site was chosen for an air station--for the purpose of binding together the loose soil and preventing its shifting in the heavy winds. Wherever the trees had encroached too closely upon the hangars, the plantations had been burned off. Over one considerable area the accumulations of ash in the depressions showed the destruction to have been comparatively recent, and this I learned had been burned over, in the panic which followed the blowing up of the Tondern sheds by British bombing machines last summer, in order to minimize the risk from the raid which Nordholz itself never ceased to expect right down to the day of the armistice. The staggering size of the great sheds became more and more impressive as we drew nearer, and when the procession finally turned and went clattering down the roadway between one of the pairs, the towering walls to left and right blotted out the sky like the cliffs of a rocky cañon. Halfway through this great defile the officers of the station were waiting to receive and conduct us round. A hard, fit, capable-looking lot of chaps they were. Every one of them had at least one decoration, most of them many, and among these were two or three Orders _Pour de Mérite_, the German V.C. One at least of them--the great long-distance pilot, Von Butlar--was famous internationally, and few among the senior of them (as I was assured shortly) but had been over England more than once. They were the best of Germany's surviving Zeppelin pilots, and one was interested to compare the type with that of the pick of her sea-pilots as we had seen them at Norderney. Running my eye round their faces as the mingled parties began moving slowly toward the side door of the first shed to be inspected, I recognized at once in these Zeppelin officers the same hard, cold, steady eyes, the same aggressive jaw, and the same wide, thin-lipped mouth that had predominated right through the officers we had met at Norderney. These, I should say, are characteristic of the great majority of the outstanding men of both of Germany's air services. The steady eye and the firm jaw are, indeed, characteristic of most successful flying men, but it is the "hardness," not to say cruelty, of the mouth which differentiates the German from the high-spirited, devil-may-care air-warrior of England and America.