enemy might make, and his quick wits how to take advantage of it. Last
autumn, whenever the weather kept scout machines from their patrols but
was not too bad for joy-flying, he would fly near the aerodrome and
practise his pet manoeuvres for hours at a time. In the early days of
Ball's dazzling exploits his patrol leader once complained, after an
uneventful trip, that he left the formation immediately it crossed the
lines, and stayed away until the return journey. Ball's explanation was
that throughout the show he remained less than two hundred feet below
the leader's machine, "practising concealment."

The outstanding pilots of my old squadron were all individualists in
attack, and it was one of my hobbies to contrast their tactics. C., with
his blind fatalism and utter disregard of risk, would dive a machine
among any number of Huns, so that he usually opened a fight with an
advantage of startling audacity. S., another very successful leader,
worked more in co-operation with the machines behind him, and took care
to give his observer every chance for effective fire. His close watch on
the remainder of the formation saved many a machine in difficulties from
disaster. V., my pilot and flight-commander, was given to a quick dive
at the enemy, a swerve aside, a recul pour mieux sauter, a vertical turn
or two, and another dash to close grips from an unexpected direction,
while I guarded the tail-end.

But writing reminiscences of Umpty Squadron's early days is a melancholy
business. When it was first formed all the pilots were picked men, for
the machines were the best British two-seaters then in existence, and
their work throughout the autumn push was to be more dangerous than that
of any squadron along the British front. The price we paid was that nine
weeks from our arrival on the Somme only nine of the original thirty-six
pilots and observers remained. Twelve officers flew to France with the
flight to which I belonged. Six weeks after their first job over the
lines I was one of the only two survivors. Three of the twenty-five who
dropped out returned to England with wounds or other disabilities; the
rest, closely followed by twenty of those who replaced them, went to
Valhalla, which is half-way to heaven; or to Karlsruhe, which is between
hell and Freiburg-im-Brisgau.

And the reward? One day, in a letter written by a captured Boche airman,
was found the sentence: "The most-to-be-feared of British machines is
the S-