med in the eyes of the doer to degrade the honour!

* * * * *

With this true tale I have come back to a recollection of the words of
the flying officer in charge of the aerodrome mentioned in my second
letter, after he had described to me the incessant raiding and fighting
of our airmen behind the enemy lines.

"Many of them don't come back. What then? _They will have done their
job._"

The report which reaches the chateau on our last evening illustrates
this casual remark. It shows that 89 machines were lost during February,
60 of them German. We claimed 41 of these, and 23 British machines were
"missing" or "brought down."

But as I write the concluding words of this letter (May 3rd) a far more
startling report--that for April--lies before me. "There has not been a
month of such fighting since the war began, and the losses have never
reached such a tremendous figure," says the _Times_. The record number
so far was that for September 1916, in the height of the Somme
fighting--322. But during April, according to the official reports, "the
enormous number of 717 aeroplanes were brought to earth as the result of
air-fights or by gun-fire." Of these, 369 were German--269 of them
brought down by the British and 98 by the French. The British lost 147;
the French and Belgian, if the German claims can be trusted, 201.

It is a terrible list, and a terrible testimony to the extreme
importance and intensity of the air-fighting now going on. How few of
us, except those who have relatives or dear friends in the air-service,
realise at all the conditions of this fighting--its daring, its epic
range, its constant development!

All the men in it are young. None of them can have such a thing as a
nerve. Anyone who betrays the faintest suspicion of one in his first
flights is courteously but firmly returned to his regiment. In peace the
airman sees this solid earth of ours as no one else sees it; and in war
he makes acquaintance by day and night with all its new and strange
aspects, amid every circumstance of danger and excitement, with death
always at hand, his life staked, not only against the enemy and all his
devices on land and above it, but against wind and cloud, against the
treacheries of the very air itself.

In the midst of these conditions the fighting airman shoots, dodges,
pursues, and dives, intent only on one thing, the destruction of his
enemy, while the observer photographs, mar