- from the book 'Many Fronts'
- "It's a Way They Have in the Air Corps"
- edited by Lewis R. Freeman 1918
Hunting for 'Zepp's'
Zeppelins over London - two German illustrations
I
It had been all of nine years since I first met Home at an estancia house-party in the heart of the Argentine Pampas, and fully seven since I last saw him at a banquet given at the Buenos Aires Jockey Club in his honour, a day or two after he had led his four to victory in the finals of the River Plate polo championships. Yet, in spite of the pallor of a face I had always remembered as bronzed, and a slight hitch in his once swinging gait, I recognised him instantly —it was the keen, piercing glance, I think, and the sudden flash of white teeth in the quick smile—when he hailed me from a passing taxi and came hobbling back along the broad pavement of Whitehall to meet me.
"What does this mean?" I asked, indicating his jaunty Flying Corps uniform, after we had shaken hands. "I thought it was the army you were in before you resigned to become an opulent estancicro and 'man-about-the-Pampas.'"
“It was the army I came back to," he replied, “I was with my old regiment at Neuve Chapelle when a fragment of hand-grenade effected a semi-solution of the continuity of one of my Achilles tendon and put a period on my further usefulness in that branch of the service. The 'air' was still open to me, however, and, as I had already dabbled in flying,—I was the first man to pilot an aeroplane across the Plate estuary,—I got a commission almost immediately, and so lost very little time."
"But your 'lily-white' face and hands," I pressed. "I never heard that the air had a bleaching effect on the complexion."
"Oh—that— " (Home looked absently at a blue-veined hand and shuffled uneasily), "that must have come from my spell of 'C.H.'— confined in hospital. Got knocked up a bit again. Flying over Belgium. Got shot down and hit the edge of Holland a trifle too hard when I volplaned over the boundary. Telescoped a few vertebras, that's all. Now, be a good chap and stop asking questions and jump in with me and come along to the Club."
Home waited for me while I picked up a few promised figures at the "Lloyd- Georgery," as he facetiously called the new Ministry of Munitions in Whitehall Gardens, and then took me up to one of the Service clubs in Piccadilly.
There, without giving me further chance to "get him up into the air," he launched at once into news and reminiscence of the Plate and the Pampas. When I left him at six, we had talked for close on two hours without more than the most casual reference to events of the war.
"A keen patriot, like all the rest of these young Britons who have flocked home from overseas to fight for their country," I reflected as I sauntered down through Green Park; "but certainly not keen on his work." I even speculated as to whether or not Home might be in some "sort of trouble in the service. Nothing else seemed to account for the man's reticence regarding everything connected with his special activities.
A few days later Home called me up to ask me to dine with him that evening at a famous old restaurant in the Strand.
" 'S------'s' is a bit more 'merry and bright' than this old tomb of a Club," he said, "and a few of the Flying Corps chaps who are in the habit of rendezvousing there while in London on leave you'll find well worth knowing."
The gathering was even more informal than I had anticipated. One of the long tables, it appeared, was set aside for "R.F.C." officers and their friends, and these dropped in by twos and threes, as suited their convenience, all the way from seven to ten o'clock.
There were half-a-dozen men at the table when Home and I entered, and all of these— they had stalls for a new "revue"—presently took their leave. One of the group was a South African, one a New Zealander, and two Australians. The latter we found bent over the racing page of the Sydney Bulletin, while the New Zealander was evidently trying to persuade the Africander that a dairy herd near Wellington offered better prospects than a general farm in Rhodesia. One of the Australians, whose family was interested in an importing house, lingered behind a moment to ask me if I thought the war was going to force up the price of American agricultural machinery in foreign markets. None of them said a word about flying, and Home volunteered no more than that they were all "good men—that little chap from New Zealand really 'topping.' "
Home, with the fleshpots of Argentina in his mind, ordered solidly and lengthily, and three or four more officers had "wolfed" hasty meals of roast beef and whisky-and- soda before our Chateaubriand (which represents the nearest Anglo-French equivalent to the came asado of the Pampas) had been done to its proper turn over the coals. These, like the others, rattled on about the music-halls, the homeland, the "rotten London weather"—anything and everything, in fact, save the war in general and the I war in the air in particular.
One, it is true,—he had come from France only that afternoon,—in accounting for a bandaged hand, did mention something about getting a finger jammed under the belt of his machine-gun; but it seemed to occur to no one to inquire what he had been shooting at, or whether or not he had hit it, or any of a dozen or so other things concerning which I, for one, was at once consumed with interest.
By nine all of those with theatre or other I engagements had come and gone, and the eight i or ten still seated at the table were leisurely diners with the evening on their hands. Yet not even among these unhurried ones was there evident any inclination to talk of their work. On the contrary, I fancied I discerned an inclination to avoid, to "side-step" it. When they were reminiscent, it was the friends and events of their old life—"trekking," "caravanning," "hiking," "mushing "; Arctic midnights and tropic dawns; strange odds and ends of adventure by land and sea—that they called up. And when they spoke of the present, it was in connection with little happenings incident to their leaves—with the comparative merits of "kit" shops, Turkish baths, "revue" favourites, the pros and cons of drink restriction, and the extortionate charges of dentists.
Yet every man of them appeared true to what I have since come to recognise as a rapidly-developing type—the "Flying Type." The army aviator of to-day is picked for his quickness of mind and body, and the first thing that strikes you about him is a sort of feline, wound-up-spring alertness. Then you note his reticence, the cool reserve of a man whose lot it is to express himself in deeds rather than words. And lastly there is the quiet seriousness, verging almost on sadness, of the man who must hold himself ready to look Death between the eyes at any moment, and yet keep his mind detached for other things.
It was the youngest, and therefore the least "formed," officer of the lot—a lad who had left his cacao plantation in Trinidad to come home and fight—who was responsible for the only " shop " discussion of the evening. Noting that he was eating but little, and constantly passing his hand over his temples, some one asked him banteringly if he was "homesick or only lovesick."
"Neither," he answered, relaxing his set lips in a forced smile. "Had a bit of an accident yesterday, and have had a deuce of a headache ever since. Can't for the life of me make out whether it comes from going up too high or coming down too quick. I went up higher and came down faster than ever before in my experience. Landed all right, but ever since I've fell as though I were being blown up by a tire- pump] that was driving air into every capillary and' nerve-tip. My head feels as though some one] was opening up a jack-screw inside of it. Sup-.] pose I should have gone to the hospital and! found out what was wrong, but I didn't want to spoil my leave. Maybe some of you chaps can tell me why I feel as though I had to keep holding.' my head together to stop its flying to pieces,"! he concluded, pressing the heels of his hands to] his temples to offset the seeming pressure from | within.
Every one stopped talking and leaned forward] with interest, and for an instant I thought the] curtain was going to drop and reveal something] of the experiences, if not the minds, of those khaki-clad sphinxes of the air. Home's coldly i professional diagnosis dashed the hope. "Altitude," he pronounced laconically. "Got over twelve thousand, didn't you? Over thirteen thousand? That accounts for it. And you went up wide-open, trying to take 'pride of place' away from a Fokker, I suppose? Of course. And when you got there you began to feel like a deep-sea fish looks when you bring him up out of the kelp-beds and his own air-bladders blow him up? A man can go up fifteen thousand feet by rail or on foot without more than a shortness of breath and occasional nose-bleed. But not every man—and not even every seasoned flyer—can stand jumping up to twelve thousand feet in the half-hour that some of the new machines can negotiate that height in. The difficulty's almost entirely physical, and it all depends upon how a man is made whether or not his flesh and blood will accommodate themselves to the suddenly reduced pressure of the atmosphere. There's no growing used to it. If it gets you once, it's pretty sure to do it again. At the best you may only have a bad headache and a sort of boiled-owl feeling for a week. At the worst you faint, lose control of your machine, and are listed among the casualties of 'cause unknown.' Did you lose control, by any chance?"
"I think not," was the reply. "It was a second German machine—one that I hadn't seen —that brought me down. It came nose-diving down out of a cloud, shaking its tail, and giving me a regular shower-bath of bullets—the usual Fokker trick. I'm almost positive I can remember all the way down. Fact is, with my machine' in the shape that it was after its peppering, any lapse on my part would have started it somersaulting at once. No. Rotten as I felt, I'm sure I kept ' connected up ' mentally all the way down."
Home shook his head dubiously. "You may be able to stick it," he said; "but before you try any more big-game shooting among the high places, best have a few practice flights in the upper empyrean. The sooner a man learns his altitude limit the better. There's plenty of useful work below twelve thousand feet for the,! man who begins to 'blow-up'—mentally or physically —above that height."
Conversation became general again even before Home had finished speaking, for to most of them there was nothing new in what he was saying. None but the man on the left of the young West Indian ventured an inquiry as to the; details of what had happened, and it was only by straining my ears that I was able to catch the drift of the low-voiced, almost monosyllabic exchange.
"Get your petrol tank?"
"No, for a wonder. Got about everything else, though. Propeller all chewed up; wings a pair of sieves. Bumped the bumps all the way down. Ground was about the softest thing I hit."
"Any one get the Hun?"
"None of us. Got himself, though. He came breezing out of a tuft of cirro-cumuli all of fifteen thousand feet up, and seemed to be going wild; sort of running amuck. Seemed to be trying to ram me when he nose-dived, and the reason he bored me so full of holes was that he didn't sheer off to give me a berth. Missed me by a hair, and almost upset me with his wind. But he never recovered from his dive. Just seemed to lose control and started going end over end. Fell almost into some of our trenches. I landed five miles away from the wreck of him with nothing shot up but my machine and my nerves."
"Any one get the first machine—the one you went up after?"
"No. It had the heels of all of us. The Hun's 'Archies' brought down one of our machines that tried to follow it."
"Shop" interest waned at this juncture, and the conversation upon which I had been eavesdropping veered off via headache-remedies and a pretty Scotch nurse at a hospital in France to the comparative merits of the "Empire" and "Alhambra" choruses; and I was able to turn both ears to Home, who had been holding forth learnedly for some minutes on the points of the Andean pony-thoroughbred cross as a polo mount.
II
Our fellow diners drifted away as they had come—singly, and in twos and threes— and by ten o'clock Home and I were alone in the deserted lounge with our cigars and coffee. He was expecting to be rung up at ten-thirty, he said, and as the time approached I could not help noticing that he became distrait and nervous, palpably anxious. The call came promptly, and it was with a look of ill-concealed apprehension on his face that he rose to follow the summoning flunkey to the telephone booth. A minute later he returned walking on air. Twice or thrice he tried to take up the dropped thread of Argentine reminiscence, finally giving it up as a bad job.
"I can't help telling you that I've just had some very good news," he exclaimed, with beaming face. "For six weeks now I have been haunted by a fear that that last jarring up I got was going to put me out of the game for good. Yesterday I had the doctors go over me, and now, after being kept all day on tenterhooks, comes word that, so far as flying is concerned, I'm going to be as right as rain. Nothing whatever likely to occur to prevent my going back in a fortnight. I think I must be just about the happiest man in London to-night.
He checked himself with a deprecatory gesture. "Really, you'll have to pardon my outburst, old chap; but I wasn't half sure that I wasn't in line for invaliding out. Besides, I've been fairly itching to be 'up' all day. There's been witchery in the air ever since sunrise. I've never known more perfect flying weather. Which reminds me, by the way, that the Zepps are expected in this vicinity to-night. They were on the 'East Coast' last night, you know. It's just a little too clear for their purposes; but the air itself is perfect—perfect. There haven't been more than one or two other such days for flying as this one since the war began. You can't understand it till you've been in the air yourself. It was in the blood of all those chaps at dinner this evening. They talked about everything on earth except flying; and were thinking about nothing else but that. Didn't you notice that they were as restive as the lions in the Zoo an hour before feeding time?"
Throwing aside all reserve, Home began to speak of his work—his love of it, the fascination of it, the great and increasingly important part it was playing in the war. This was precisely what, hoping against hope, I had been trying to draw him out on all the evening; and so, lighting a fresh cigar, I sank back contentedly in my armchair to play the part of the appreciative auditor. Scarcely was I well settled, however, when Home abruptly ceased speaking and leaned forward with his head cocked in an attitude of attentive listening.
"Did you hear that?" he whispered; "and that, and that?"
"Nothing but the chatter of the first dribble of the supper crowd," I answered. "What is it?"
"Bombs," was the reply; " three or four of them. And, I think, gun-fire. The Zepps must be nearer London than they have been at any time since last October. Let's get down to the Embankment. We can see from there, if anywhere. They never wander far from the 'river road.' "
The Strand, packed with the crowds from the emptying theatres, was plainly oblivious and unalarmed, and I promptly taxed Home with letting either the wine or the "perfect air conditions" go to his head. He said nothing, but, all the way down the black little canyon of a street along which we threaded our way, appeared to be listening intently. Not until we were about to emerge into the brighter blankness of the Embankment did he speak again.
"There have been no more bombs," he said, "but I think the guns are going right along. If the sound is too faint for your 'unattuned' ear, perhaps the fact that you hear no shunting of trains or whistling at Charing Cross or Waterloo (you know of the new order which halts all trains during air-raids) will convince you that the Zepps are about. Or if not that, then come along here and have some ocular evidence. What do you say to that?” And Home pointed off down past the looming mass of St. Paul's to where the stationary beam of a single searchlight laid low along the eastern horizon.
"I see the searchlight plainly enough," I said, "but where's the Zepp?”
"Take my glass," said Home, handing me a small pair of semi-collapsible binoculars which was evidently a constant companion. "Now focus on that point of brighter glow, with a shadow behind it, half-way down the shaft—right there, straight over the back of the right-hand lion at the foot of the Obelisk."
I did as directed, fairly to gasp with astonishment as a tiny blur, so indistinct as to go unnoticed by the passers-by on the Embankment, sharpened to a long, yellow-ribbed pencil, with pin-points of light—fireflies escorting a glow-worm—flashing out and disappearing above and below and round about it.
"The first Zepp to get over London in six months," I ejaculated excitedly. "How long will she take to get here? Hadn't we better get away from the river and under cover? But no," I went on, peering through the glass again; "I don't think she's coming this way. Seems to be standing still. Probably hovering over W------, the old objective."
"London! W------!" laughed Home. "Do you realise that you didn't hear any bombs, and that none of these people have any idea that there's a raiding Zeppelin, with shells bursting about it, squarely in their range of vision? That fellow's all of twenty- five miles away, and as for its hovering, you may rest assured that when you see a Zepp with incendiary shells bursting above it, it is either badly hit or else doing seventy miles an hour toward the home hangars. As a matter of fact, I've been expecting to see this fellow begin to drop at any moment. He's evidently run into better guns and gunners than he counted on. Ah! No hope!" (Home snatched his glass and turned it quickly on the now agitated searchlight beam.) "He's gone. Even the light's lost him."
Home turned around disgustedly, led the way to a bench by the curb, pushed along a somnolent " match dame " to make room for him, and wearily sat down.
"He's slippery game—the Zepp," he observed presently, after watching the futile flounderings of the questing searchlight. "I didn't tell you, did I, that it was through trying to get a Zepp that I came that last cropper of mine over Belgium?”
"You know perfectly well you didn't," I replied, folding a corner of the old match- seller's straggling cloak back over her knees and sitting down in the space vacated. "Go to it."
"I was starting on a reconnaissance over a corner of Belgium just as the Zepp was returning from a raid over France. I got above him, and just after I dropped my first bomb the 'Archies' opened up on me from the ground and put me out at just about the first shot. Jolly nervy work, with my machine only a couple of hundred feet above the Zepp. A little too nervy, perhaps, for I've never been quite certain in my own mind whether it was my bomb or one from the German guns which sent the Zepp—not wrecked but pretty badly messed up—down into a sugar-beet field. I headed------"
"Just a moment," I interrupted, anticipating the end of the tale at the end of Home's next breath. "You're dumping over your story just the way a Zeppelin under fire dumps over its bombs. Now please back up and tell it properly. The night is young, the raiders are now headed out to sea, and the lady and I are here to follow you to the end."
Ill
Home laughed uneasily, fumbled through his pockets in a vain search for matches, filched a box from the tilted tray of our nodding companion,—leaving a sixpence in its place.—lit his pipe, puffed pensively for a minute or two; and even after all that preparation made his beginning apologetic.
"I don't know that I've ever told the yarn from the beginning," he said, "and I'm dead sure I've never said much about the end. If I chatter a bit to-night, you'll please check it up against the good news I had a while ago—and the air. A man could pretty nearly walk on the air as it has been to-day, and a machine would slide through it like tearing silk. Funny thing, but it was in the dawn following almost just such a night as this that I went off on the flight I have spoken of.
"There are three main factors in flying,"— Home spoke more freely again as. he digressed upon generalities,—"the man, the machine, and the atmosphere. Theoretically, man and machine are supposed to be sent out in perfect order, ready to take the air as they find it. There are days, of course, when you are 'off, your machine 'cranky,' and the air all 'heights' and 'hollows,' and at such times there is pretty sure to be a 'stormy passage,' if nothing worse. Usually, however, it's a fairly fit man and machine against indifferent air. But once or twice a year there comes a period, like the last eighteen hours, when the air is almost absolutely' homogeneous,' and then, with his engine running 'sweet,' the man has spells of fancying himself an 'air god' in fact as well as in name, and acts accordingly, —invariably either to his own or his enemy's sorrow.
"It was like that on the morning I am telling you about—man, machine, and air all in harmony—yes, and with the usual result. I would have remembered this flight for several reasons, even if the Zepp hadn't come along; for one, because of our ride down the wake of a '42' shell; for another, on account of the terrific shelling they gave, or tried to give us, as we passed over the German lines.
"The meeting with the shell was merely one of those freak experiences that might happen to any one, or, just as well, never happen at all. It was during the time I am speaking of that the Germans were amusing themselves by a long-distance bombardment of N------with their biggest guns, and we—(I had an observation officer along, a chap named K------, whom you may have heard of as a long-distance runner)— simply chanced to meander into the path of one shell somewhere about the last quarter of its trajectory. Watching from a distance, you can always see one of these brutes go hurtling along, but this one we only heard,—and felt,—and it was like two express trains, going in opposite directions, passing at full speed. There was a strange soft sort of a buzz, growing into a rushing roar inside of two or three seconds, a blow from a solid wall of air that was like colliding with the side of a house, and then, for two or three minutes, a series of bumps like going over a corduroy road in a springless cart.
"I don't know whether we interfered very much with the course of that shell, but the shell pretty nearly brought our flight to an end then and there. Only the fact that we met the first big rush of air head-on saved us. I wouldn't have had one chance in a thousand of correcting if it had caught us sideways—and even as it was, the machine, in spite of its seventy-miles-an-hour headway, was stood up on its rudder like a rearing horse. After that first 'collision,' our fluttering flight down the wake of the '42' was only 'queer,' but withal a different sensation from anything I had ever experienced.
"I have no idea how close we passed to each-other. My impression of the moment was that the distance was inside of fifty yards, though it was doubtless really much greater. We were not, of course, going in exactly opposite directions, for the shell must have been coming down at a considerably greater angle than that at which we were going up. Yet the 'aerial surf' stirred up by the passage of the Hun's little messenger of goodwill in that smooth stretch of atmosphere was heavy and persistent enough to keep my machine wallowing for over a mile.
"The air was going by us in a swift, steady river as we neared the German lines, and I never recall having been able to climb so quickly and easily. Lucky it was, too, for the enemy— probably in anticipation of a pursuit of their returning raiders—had their whole trench hinterland planted with anti-aircraft guns, both stationary and movable. There was one little strip that blossomed out like a poppy garden as they opened up on us, and for a minute or so the smoke from the spreading shell-bursts formed a good-sized little cloud of its own. But they never had any real chance of getting us. My good little engine, singing like the wind in the telephone wires, had enabled me to get up over fourteen thousand feet without turning a hair and at that height you're a lot safer from shells in an aeroplane than from taxis in crossing the Strand. K------ was feeling the altitude a bit, I think; I saw him wiping blood from his nose and pressing his hands to his ears, but he gave no signs of real distress. As for myself, beyond a little swelling of the fingers and a drumming at the temples, I was quite as usual.
"We passed over the main 'bouquets' of the 'Archies' without even feeling the kick of the shells bursting beneath us; but in dropping down to ten thousand feet a few miles beyond, we encountered an unexpected 'plant' of them and the shrapnel bullets were flying all about us for a minute or two. A score of neat little holes winked out in the wings, and one friendly bit of a bullet—spent, but still hot from its sharp flight— dropped gently into my lap and slightly singed the fold of my coat in which it found lodgement. Then we left that mare's nest behind and the going grew smoother once more.
"It was only a few minutes later, and before any beginning had been made on the work we had come for, that K------ picked up a Zepp through his glass and began reporting its progress to me over the telephone. At first it was flying very high, doubtless to keep above gunfire in crossing our lines. Once over, however, it came down rapidly, probably, as K------ suggested', with the purpose of luring the pursuing aeroplanes into easy range of the German 'Archies.' If that was the plan, it was eminently successful; for K------ presently reported one of our chasers falling in flames, another planing for our own lines, and two or three others turning back. I could see the marauder myself by this time, and noted that it appeared to be heading off about twenty-five degrees to the west of me, and flying already at a level considerably lower than the twelve thousand feet I had run up to in getting away from the last spasm of gun-fire.
"It was this commanding height, together with the fact that my engine was running as sweetly as when it started, that determined me to take a hand in the game at this juncture. Still keeping well up, I promptly headed across to cut off the returning prodigal. For a minute or two the Zepp either didn't recognise me as enemy, or else ignored me entirely. But presently a sharp speeding up of its engines was apparent, and for a moment I thought that it was going to challenge me for a climbing contest, generally a Zepp's first resort. But a few seconds later it had altered its course through nearly half a quadrant and headed off at top speed, at the same time beginning to descend at what I figured was about an angle of ten per cent., or five hundred feet to the mile. The ruse—to draw me down over some concealed line of 'Archies' in that direction—was plain as day; but I had three thousand feet of altitude to the good, power to burn, and, moreover, was bitten deep for the moment with that 'air-god' bug I have spoken of. It seemed as natural that I should chase Zepps as that a fox-terrier should chase chickens. Without further thought, I accepted the challenge and launched off in pursuit of the speeding 'sausage.'
"It really never occurred to me to discuss the thing with K------, but, like the trump he was, he never showed by word or sign that tilting at airships had not been included in our orders. He, also, twigged the game at once.
" 'Guns probably in that thick clump of trees by the little pond,' his far-away voice said over the telephone. ' Best catch him as far this side there as you can. One of his engines missing badly, and he's not going very fast.'
"With a quarter of an hour instead of a couple of minutes to work in,' I would have preferred to keep along on a comparatively high level, and only descend, to drop my bombs,_ at an angle that would have kept me pretty well out of the range of the Zepp's guns. But K------'s warning was too sound to be disregarded and, in this casev the quickest way was also the only way. As it was, it was really almost a nose-dive, and I did the first half of it with the throttle wide open. So fast did we come up with the Zepp that it seemed almost as if a giant had taken the big gas-bag in his hand and thrown it at us.
"The patter of machine-gun bullets sounded only for a second or two—it wasn't unlike walking over a lawn-sprinkler—and, so far as I could see, did no harm. Then, cold as ice for the work in hand, I shot straight down along the yellow spine of the airship, letting go a couple of bombs before my terrific speed carried me beyond my mark.
"Now a perfect torrent of shrapnel burst out around me—the smoke-tufts made the still distant clump of trees look like a cotton field— and almost at the same instant there was a strong rush of air from below. The machine teetered giddily on one wing- tip for a moment, and I just managed to right it in time to free a hand to grab the tail of K------'s coat as he, apparently unconscious, started to lurch over the side. I don't seem to have any very clear recollection of being able to get him back into his seat at all.
"I didn't have a chance for another good look at the Zepp; I only know that it descended rapidly, although apparently not entirely out of control. My machine, badly shot up as it was, still seemed to have a good deal of kick left, though the reek of petrol in the air wasn't an encouraging indication that its vitality would continue. The impetus of my descent quickly carried me out of range of that spiteful but isolated little battery of Archies'—luckily, too, in just the direction I wanted to go.
"Just before I flew over the Zepp—it was while the machine-gun bullets were still pattering, I have since recalled—K------ 'phoned me the compass bearing of the nearest point of the Dutch boundary, and said something about it being our only chance if things went wrong. (That they had already ' gone wrong ' with him he gave no hint.) Strangely, the figures had stuck in my head, and it was in that direction I sheered as soon as the machine was on an even keel again. It was not far, thank heaven, and, partly planing, partly under the power of that brave little half-fed engine, I somehow managed to keep up long enough to clear the top wire of the boundary fence and pile up in a heap in the hospitable silt of good old Holland."
A dozen questions tumbled after each other off the tip of my eager tongue, and the old "match dame," who had snored peacefully all through Home's even narration, stirred and muttered petulantly at the unwonted disturbance. But Home, rising and working his stiff joints, essayed to answer all in a single breath.
"I don't know how much harm was done to the Zepp, or whether it was I or the Hun's own 'Archies' that did it. K------ died in a Dutch hospital, without regaining full consciousness, two days later. (It was a bullet from one of the Zepp's machine-guns that did for him.) I can't tell you how I managed to get out of Holland; and "—as a low whistle sounded from Charing Cross and a hooded eye peeped cautiously out of the black shed—"the trains are running again; so we may take it that the little visitor we were watching is now out over the North Sea and on its way home to bed. I think it's high time that we followed its good example on the latter score. Good-night and sweet dreams, mother." And he took my arm and began piloting me back to the Strand to waylay a taxi.
Home has been back at work for a month now, and, so far as I have heard, with no recurrence of ill luck. Last week I met another friend from Argentina—a doctor, returned to "do his bit" with the Red Cross. "Home has made a brilliant success of his flying," he said; " did he tell you anything of his exploits?”
"Only a little about a brush with a Zeppelin," I replied, "and scant details of that."
"That's all he has ever told anyone. Yet the Dutch patrol swear that he came down in Holland with the tail of his half-dead observation officer's coat in his teeth (only thing that kept the chap from falling out); and there is also every reason to believe that it was his bombs that brought that Zepp down, and badly knocked up, too.
Either one of them would bring him anything from the Military Cross to the V.C. if he would tell even the plain, unvarnished tale of it. But the quixotic idiot made his report so confoundedly non-committal that there was simply nothing for his commander to go by. Was hardly enough to merit mention in dispatches the way it stood, much less to award a decoration on. Queer thing, but they say they've had the same sort of trouble with a number of the flying chaps. Seems to be a sort of cult with them. Can't say it's a wholly bad one, either."
