e landed, only to find ourselves in an uneven meadow,
containing, besides the aeroplane already mentioned, one cow, one pond,
and some Brass Hats.[1] As the second bus was taxiing over the grass the
pilot jerked it round sharply to avoid the pond. His undercarriage gave,
the propeller hit the earth and smashed itself, and the machine heeled
over and pulled up dead, with one wing leaning on the ground.

Marmaduke, our war baby, was the pilot of the maimed machine. He is
distinctly young, but he can on occasion declaim impassioned language in
a manner that would be creditable to the most liver-ridden major in the
Indian Army. The Brass Hats seemed mildly surprised when, after
inspecting the damage, Marmaduke danced around the unfortunate bus and
cursed systematically persons and things so diverse as the thingumy fool
whose machine had misled us into landing, the thingumy pond, the
thingumy weather expert who ought to have warned us of the thingumy
Channel mist, the Kaiser, his aunt, and his contemptible self.

He was no what-you-may-call-it good as a pilot, shouted Marmaduke to the
ruminative cow, and he intended to leave the blank R.F.C. for the Blanky
Army Service Corps or the blankety Grave-diggers Corps. As a last
resort, he would get a job as a double-blank Cabinet Minister, being no
blank-blank good for anything else.

The Brass Hats gazed and gazed and gazed. A heavy silence followed
Marmaduke's outburst, a silence pregnant with possibilities of Staff
displeasure, of summary arrest, of--laughter. Laughter won. The Brass
Hats belonged to the staff of an Anzadian division in the neighbourhood,
and one of them, a young-looking major with pink riding breeches and a
prairie accent, said--

"Gentlemen, some beautiful birds, some beautiful swear, and, by
Abraham's trousers, some beautiful angel boy."

Marmaduke wiped the foam from his mouth and apologised.

"Not at all," said the Brass Hat from one of our great Dominions of
Empire, "I do it every day myself, before breakfast generally."

Meanwhile the news of our arrival had rippled the calm surface of the
daily round at Dovstone. Obviously, said the good people to each other,
the presence of three aeroplanes in a lonely field, with a guard of
Anzadians around the said field, must have some hidden meaning. Perhaps
there had been a German air raid under cover of the mist. Perhaps a
German machine had been brought down. Within half an hour of our erratic
landing a do