A searchlight wheeled and the anti-aircraft spoke on the word; some one cried, "Got ’im," and pointed, and for an instant William had sight of a wicked thing caught in the ray and rushing upwards. Battery and machine-gun gave tongue at the sight, but in a flash the climbing devil had vanished and the searchlight wheeled after it fruitlessly. As they stood and watched it wheeling, a voice called, "Come in, men," and they went back perforce within their walls. The first attack had lasted not much over half an hour; this time the ordeal by darkness and waiting was longer. William held himself tightly, ashamed of the weakness with which Wright had infected him and keeping it doggedly at bay; he talked when he could think of anything to talk about—odd irrelevant fragments of whatever came into his head, anything to keep himself from listening. At one time he made a conscious and determined effort to turn his talk and his mind with it to something unconnected with air-raids; but always his speech, like that of his companions, came back to the thought of the moment. "Do you remember," he asked a man beside him, "what a fuss there was about the first Channel flight? I forget the fellow’s name—a Frenchman?" Some one supplied the name, "Bleriot," out of the darkness. "Yes, Bleriot—that’s it.... Queer when you think of it. Nobody had any idea then what it would mean—getting into cellars and hiding in the dark. If they had"—he forced an attempt at a laugh—"they wouldn’t have been so pleased." "No," his neighbour agreed with him jocularly; "they wouldn’t have been so pleased. We thought we was all going to flap about like birds—and instead the most of us go scuttling into holes like beetles what the cook’s trying to stamp on. That’s flying—for them as don’t fly." "Yes," said William, "that’s flying." The beetle simile caught his fancy oddly, and he found himself contrasting it with his old idea of a soldier. After all, the beetle-warrior was a new development—it was impossible to think of Napoleonic heroes as beetles. Yet if they were alive they would have to scuttle too—even Murat the magnificent, and Ney, the Red Lion ... "When the next war comes," his jocular neighbour was continuing, "every man that ain’t in the R.F.C. ’ull be crawling at the bottom of a coal-mine. And I don’t mind mentioning in confidence that if I saw a coal-mine ’andy I wouldn’t mind crawling down it now." "No," said William, for the sake of speaking, "I don’t suppose you would." He was trying to think of something further to say when he felt the man on his other side start perceptibly and stiffen in attention. Something caught at his throat and he could only whisper, "What is it?" "He’s stopping his engine," said the other quietly; and before William had time to ask what he meant the next bomb fell in the courtyard. * * * * *