other
French and American pilots. There is no petty jealousy among airmen,
and in our group the _esprit de corps_ is unusually fine. Rivalry is
keen, but each squadron takes almost as much pride in the work of the
other squadrons as it does in its own.

The details of the result were horrible. The Albatross broke up two
thousand metres from the ground, one wing falling within the French
lines. Drew knew what it meant to be wounded and falling out of
control. But his Spad held together. He had a chance for his life.
Supposing the German to have been merely wounded--An airman's joy in
victory is a short-lived one.

Nevertheless, a curious change takes place in his attitude toward his
work, as the months pass. I can best describe it in terms of Drew's
experience and my own. We came to the front feeling deeply sorry for
ourselves, and for all airmen of whatever nationality, whose lives
were to be snuffed out in their promising beginnings. I used to play
"The Minstrel Boy to the War Has Gone" on a tin flute, and Drew wrote
poetry. While we were waiting for our first machine, he composed "The
Airman's Rendezvous," written in the manner of Alan Seeger's poem.

"And I in the wide fields of air
Must keep with him my rendezvous.
It may be I shall meet him there
When clouds, like sheep, move slowly through
The pathless meadows of the sky
And their cool shadows go beneath,--
I have a rendezvous with Death
Some summer noon of white and blue."

There is more of it, in the same manner, all of which he read me in a
husky voice. I, too, was ready to weep at our untimely fate. The
strange thing is that his prophecy came so very near being true. He
had the first draft of the poem in his breast-pocket when wounded, and
has kept the gory relic to remind him--not that he needs reminding--of
the airy manner in which he canceled what ought to have been a
_bona-fide_ appointment.

I do not mean to reflect in any way upon Alan Seeger's beautiful poem.
Who can doubt that it is a sincere, as well as a perfect, expression
of a mood common to all young soldiers? Drew was just as sincere in
writing his verses, and I put all the feeling I could into my
tin-whistle interpretation of "The Minstrel Boy." What I want to make
clear is, that a soldier's moods of self-pity are fleeting ones, and
if he lives, he outgrows them.

Imagination is an especial curse to an airman, particularly if it
takes a gloomy or morbi