d lights far off in the distance
came hurtling toward us like the navigation lights of a fast approaching
machine; I would clutch Jack, yell, and point out the lights in order
to avoid a collision as it seemed to me; Jack would grin, pull me down
on the seat beside him, and tell me the lights were on the ground and at
least ten miles away. Gradually I got control of myself and tried to
find the aerodrome we had just left; it was nowhere to be seen. There
was a network of white threads on a black background, an occasional
winding silver ribbon with here and there a silver blotch and
queer-shaped blacker blacknesses on the general blackness; these were
roads, rivers, lakes, and woods as they looked from the air at night.

"How long we had been in the air I don't know. Time seemed nothing, or
an eternity. We were suspended in a sphere. Lights or stars rushed at us
or receded or whirled about. Time and distance became mere words without
meaning and I had fallen into a state resembling hypnotic sleep when
suddenly roused by Jack. 'There are the lines,' he shouted, and as far
as the eye could see, to left and right, out of the darkness beneath us
were the constant flashes of the never silent guns of the Flanders
front. Every now and then we got a sudden 'bump' as a shell passed near
us. I had fallen into an almost semiconscious state when
'tut-tut-tut-tut-tut' jumped me off my seat; I realized that I was
surrounded by a dazzling whiteness; the machine itself was brilliant.
Amidst the 'tut-tut-tut' of our own machine guns shooting down at the
searchlights there was a constant dull 'whonk,' 'whonk,' 'whonk,' and
the whole machine seemed to be enveloped in puffs of black smoke as the
anti-aircraft batteries found the range.

"Suddenly the nose of the machine went down and my breath left me in the
crazy rush, my hands grasped at anything, and somehow, momentarily
blinded with fright as I was, my right hand involuntarily clutching Jack
conveyed the truth to my brain. Jack was dead. He had fallen forward on
the wheel and the giant plane was rushing, roaring down to destruction.
With a spasmodic effort I pulled his body from the seat onto the floor
at my feet and pulled back the wheel. With a sickening change and a
shrill singing of wires we were climbing. How the fuselage and tail
plane stood the strain of it, God knows. I was in Jack's seat now
pushing the wheel from me, pulling it toward me, turning it to the
right, then to the