Well, it didn't take long for them to know that we were over them, and they began to let drive with their Archies. The shells began to burst pretty close to my old R. E. P.--a fast, single-passenger monoplane I was driving that day--but I stuck around and let drop all six T-N-T's and hand-bombs. I was separated from the other chaps by this time, and didn't see them, in fact. I heard in a roundabout way afterward that one of my bombs killed fourteen men and four horses. I don't know whether that's true or not. The story had it that several of the men killed were Belgians. I hope that part of it's wrong. But that's the luck of the game. Pretty soon a bomb bullet burst only a couple of hundred feet away from me, and right on my level, although my gauge showed me that I was pretty close to 11,000 feet. I said to myself: "You'd best stick her nose up, Boydie, or they'll get you. These Archies must be new ones, for they're throwing steel higher than any I ever saw before." So I climbed and climbed, circling around, until I was a few hundred feet over 12,000. There I felt absolutely safe, and began to look around to see where I was. I had passed completely over Zeebrugge and was pretty well up the coast toward a sort of a strait. I thought I'd best turn around and make back for home while the making was good. So I wheeled and began to think about breakfast. The only thing in my mind at the moment was that I was hungry. The next thing I knew there was a blinding smash right in front of me. I realized two things--that my propeller was gone and that I was falling like a stone. They'd got me at last. I didn't know whether I'd been hit anywhere or not. I just gave everything up and began to see pretty little pictures of Toronto and New York and my girl in Cleveland, and all that sort of thing. Believe me, I was a scared Canadian. It looked like curtains for J. Errol Dunston Boyd. But--you know how it is: if a fellow falls into the water he tries to swim anyhow, even if he can't. He does something instinctively to help himself. So I kept on trying, working my levers without half knowing what I was doing. You've seen that "falling leaf" stunt that the trick fliers do, haven't you--where the machine just flops from side to side as it comes down, swinging this way and then the other way? Well, that's what my old R. E. P. was doing. Then she'd loop. Some chaps who saw me coming down said she looped nine or ten times. I'd looped before, but never involuntarily. I was strapped in of course, or I'd have beaten the old bus down to the ground. IV--"I DROPPED 12,000 FEET FROM CLOUDS"