He recovered from the subsequent operation, and in hospital, some weeks afterwards, his C.O. appeared, with the news of his recommendation for the D.S.O.  The boy, for he was little more, listened with eyes of amused incredulity, opening wider and wider as the Colonel proceeded.  When the communication was over, and the C.O., attributing the young man’s silence to weakness or grateful emotion, had passed on, the nurse beside the bed saw the patient bury his head in the pillow with a queer sound of exasperation, and caught the words, “I call it perfectly childish!”

That an act so simple, so all in the bargain, should have earned the D.S.O. seemed in the eyes of the doer to degrade the honour!

* * * * *

With this true tale I have come back to a recollection of the words of the flying officer in charge of the aerodrome mentioned in my second letter, after he had described to me the incessant raiding and fighting of our airmen behind the enemy lines.

“Many of them don’t come back.  What then? They will have done their job.”

The report which reaches the chateau on our last evening illustrates this casual remark.  It shows that 89 machines were lost during February, 60 of them German.  We claimed 41 of these, and 23 British machines were “missing” or “brought down.”

But as I write the concluding words of this letter (May 3rd) a far more startling report—­that for April—­lies before me.  “There has not been a month of such fighting since the war began, and the losses have never reached such a tremendous figure,” says the Times.  The record number so far was that for September 1916, in the height of the Somme fighting—­322.  But during April, according to the official reports, “the enormous number of 717 aeroplanes were brought to earth as the result of air-fights or by gun-fire.”  Of these, 369 were German—­269 of them brought down by the British and 98 by the French.  The British lost 147; the French and Belgian, if the German claims can be trusted, 201.

It is a terrible list, and a terrible testimony to the extreme importance and intensity of the air-fighting now going on.  How few of us, except those who have relatives or dear friends in the air-service, realise at all the conditions of this fighting—­its daring, its epic range, its constant development!

All the men in it are young.  None of them can have such a thing as a nerve.  Anyone who betrays the faintest suspicion of one in his first flights is courteously but firmly returned to his regiment.  In peace the airman sees this solid earth of ours as no one else sees it; and in war he makes acquaintance by day and night with all its new and strange aspects, amid every circumstance of danger and excitement, with death always at hand, his life staked, not only against the enemy and all his devices on land and above it, but against wind and cloud, against the treacheries of the very air itself.