nyhow. He'll be game
to the last."

4

By means of a folding chair, which was still in its place behind the
door, they got to the window and looked out in turn and contemplated
a sparsely wooded country below, with no railways nor roads, and
only occasional signs of habitation. Then a bugle sounded, and Kurt
interpreted it as a summons to food. They got through the door and
clambered with some difficulty up the nearly vertical passage,
holding on desperately with toes and finger-tips, to the ventilating
perforations in its floor. The mess stewards had found their fireless
heating arrangements intact, and there was hot cocoa for the officers
and hot soup for the men.

Bert's sense of the queerness of this experience was so keen that
it blotted out any fear he might have felt. Indeed, he was far more
interested now than afraid. He seemed to have touched down to the bottom
of fear and abandonment overnight. He was growing accustomed to the idea
that he would probably be killed presently, that this strange voyage
in the air was in all probability his death journey. No human being can
keep permanently afraid: fear goes at last to the back of one's mind,
accepted, and shelved, and done with. He squatted over his soup, sopping
it up with his bread, and contemplated his comrades. They were all
rather yellow and dirty, with four-day beards, and they grouped
themselves in the tired, unpremeditated manner of men on a wreck. They
talked little. The situation perplexed them beyond any suggestion of
ideas. Three had been hurt in the pitching up of the ship during the
fight, and one had a bandaged bullet wound. It was incredible that this
little band of men had committed murder and massacre on a scale
beyond precedent. None of them who squatted on the sloping gas-padded
partition, soup mug in hand, seemed really guilty of anything of the
sort, seemed really capable of hurting a dog wantonly. They were all
so manifestly built for homely chalets on the solid earth and carefully
tilled fields and blond wives and cheery merrymaking. The red-faced,
sturdy man with light eyelashes who had brought the first news of
the air battle to the men's mess had finished his soup, and with an
expression of maternal solicitude was readjusting the bandages of a
youngster whose arm had been sprained.

Bert was crumbling the last of his bread into the last of his soup,
eking it out as long as possible, when suddenly he became aware that
every one was