"Although I'd hate to hurt their feelings," said the senior officer of the party, surveying the Gargantuan repast with a perplexed smile, "I should like to confine myself to my sandwiches and leave a note asking them to forward this to some of our starving prisoners. Since we've been feeding their pilots and commissioners in the _Hercules_, however, I suppose there's no valid reason why we should hesitate to partake of this banquet. I'll leave you free to decide for yourselves what you want to do on that score." We did. It was the American Ensign who, smacking his lips over the last of his steak, pronounced it the best "hunk of cow" he had had since he was at a Mexican _barbecue_ at Coronado; but it was the General who had a second helping of apple sauce, and wondered how they made it so "smooth and free from lumps," and what it was they put in it to give that "very delicate flavour." Hung around all four walls of the room were perhaps a dozen oil paintings of flying officers in uniform, and although they bore no names, we knew (from what had been told us of a similar display in the reception-room at Norderney) that they were portraits of pilots who had lost their lives in active service. One--a three-quarters length of a small wiry man, with gimlet eyes and a jaw that would have made that of a wolf-trap look soft and flexible in comparison--I recognized at once as having been reproduced in the German papers as the portrait of the great Schramm, who had been killed when his Zeppelin was brought down at Potters' Bar. Another--the bust of a man of rather a bulkier figure than the first, but with a face a shade less brutal--was also strangely familiar. I felt sure I had seen before that terribly determined jaw, that broad nose with its wide nostrils, that receding brow, with the bony lumps above the eyes, and the tentacles of my memory went groping for when and where, while I went on sipping my glass of _Rotwein_ and listening to Major P----[1] and Ensign E---- comparing sensations on dropping from airplanes with parachutes. [1] Major Pritchard, who subsequently distinguished himself by landing from R-34, after its transatlantic flight, with a parachute. "If the Huns," the former was saying, "had had proper parachutes most of the crews of the Zepps brought down in England could have landed safely instead of being burned in the air. Of the remains of the crew of the one brought down at Cuffley, hardly a fragment was recognizable as that of a man. But if--"