s, we saw nothing of war
there, he would say, except the lighter side, the homecoming,
leave-enjoying side. We needed to know more of the horror and the
tragedy of it. We needed to keep that close and intimate to us as a
right perspective for our future adventures. He believed it to be our
duty as aviators to anticipate every kind of experience which we might
have to meet at the front. His imagination was abnormally vivid. Once
he discussed the possibility of "falling in flames," which is so often
the end of an airman's career. I shall never again be able to take the
same whole-hearted delight in flying that I did before he was so
horribly eloquent upon the subject. He often speculated upon one's
emotions in falling in a machine damaged beyond the possibility of
control.

"Now try to imagine it," he would say: "your gasoline tanks have been
punctured and half of your _fuselage_ has been shot away. You believe
that there is not the slightest chance for you to save your life. What
are you going to do--lose your head and give up the game? No, you've
got to attempt the impossible"; and so on, and so forth.

I would accuse him of being morbid. Furthermore, I saw no reason why
we should plan for terrible emergencies which might never arrive. His
answer was that we were military pilots in training for combat
machines. We had no right to ignore the grimness of the business
ahead of us. If we did, so much the worse for us when we should go to
the front. But beyond this practical interest, he had a great
curiosity about the nature of fear, and a great dread of it, too. He
was afraid that in some last adventure, in which death came slowly
enough for him to recognize it, he might die like a terror-stricken
animal, and not bravely, as a man should.

We did not often discuss these gruesome possibilities, although this
was not Drew's fault. I would not listen to him; and so he would be
silent about them until convinced that the furtherance of our careers
as airmen demanded additional unpleasant imaginings. There was
something of the Hindoo fanatic in him; or perhaps it was the
outcropping of the stern spirit of his New England forbears. But when
he talked of the pleasant side of the adventures before us, it was
more than compensation for all the rest. Then he would make me
restless and impatient, for I did not have his faculty of enjoyment in
anticipation. The early period of training, when we were flying only a
few metres above t