now, although I was not of
this opinion at the time. In reality, we were absent barely forty
minutes. Climbing out of my machine at the aerodrome, I looked at my
watch. A quarter to twelve. Laignier, the sergeant mechanician, was
sitting in a sunny corner of the hangar, reading the "Matin," just as
I had left him.

Lieutenant Talbott's only comment was: "Don't let it worry you.
Better luck next time. The group bagged two out of four, and Irving
knocked down a Boche who was trying to get at you. That isn't bad for
half an hour's work."

But the decisive effect on morale which was to result from our
wholesale destruction of balloons was diminished by half. We had
forced ours down, but it bobbed up again very soon afterward. The
one-o'clock patrol saw it, higher, Miller said, than it had ever been.
It was Miller, by the way, who looked in on us at nine o'clock the
same evening. The lamp was out.

"Asleep?"

Neither of us was, but we didn't answer. He closed the door, then
reopened it.

"It's laziness, that's what it is. They ought to put you on school
regime again."

He had one more afterthought. Looking in a third time, he said,--

"How about it, you little old human dynamos; are you getting rusty?"

VII

BROUGHT DOWN

The preceding chapters of this journal have been written to little
purpose if it has not been made clear that Drew and I, like most
pilots during the first weeks of service at the front, were worth
little to the Allied cause. We were warned often enough that the road
to efficiency in military aviation is a long and dangerous one. We
were given much excellent advice by aviators who knew what they were
talking about. Much of this we solicited, in fact, and then proceeded
to disregard it item by item. Eager to get results, we plunged into
our work with the valor of ignorance, the result being that Drew was
shot down in one of his first encounters, escaping with his life by
one of those more than miracles for which there is no explanation.
That I did not fare as badly or worse is due solely to the indulgence
of that godfather of ours, already mentioned, who watched over my
first flights while in a mood beneficently pro-Ally.

Drew's adventure followed soon after our first patrol, when he had the
near combat with the two-seater. Luckily, on that occasion, both the
German pilot and his machine-gunner were taken completely off their
guar