I looked the machine over, and you should have seen it.  From top to bottom it was one mass of holes.  One bullet passed through my combination and hit a can of tobacco.  Another cut a main spar on one of my wings, and another hit my stabilizer, tearing it half in two.  One other hit my gas tank and put a hole clear through it.  Luckily my gas was low and it did not explode, but, believe me, I was lucky.

IN THE BIG GERMAN DRIVE

April 20, 1918.—­The orderly has just tapped on my window to put down my shade, which means the Gothas are on their way.  The guns are starting.  This attack has been frightful—­day after day long lines of ambulances roll by our camp carrying large numbers of wounded.  Tomorrow we shall continue our work of knocking down their batteries and bombing their railroads.  To-night, now, they are trying to get us.

I started on a “permission” about three weeks ago and had beautiful visions of peace and content for a week, but was called back immediately at the beginning of this horrible attack.  Things look bad, and in a few days we are moving farther up.

Our work here has been hard and exciting and always working in any kind of weather.  While our loss has been heavy we have accomplished wonders.  Going over on cloudy days when the heavy black clouds hang down to within fifty meters of the ground, spotting a group of trucks, a line of cars, or a battery of troops, then bombing them, shooting them up with your machine guns and shooting back up into the clouds midst a rain of luminous machine gun bullets from the ground is interesting work.  But the terror of those on the ground, poor devils!  Yet it’s got to be brought home.  Out of twenty-four trips we lost eight machines.  Poor Chuck Kerwood was among them.  Chuck is an American boy from Philadelphia, and he has been with us for five months.

I had a chance to go back to the states as an instructor, and almost took it, but when the time came around to leave this band of men who have been in it for almost four years, I couldn’t do it.  They are men, and have pulled me out of tight holes when I was green at this game, and they did it at the risk of their lives.  Now I’ve seen them drop off one at a time, fine young Frenchmen, and I guess the least I can do is to stay right by them and I feel my work is here.

In Hospital, May 3, 1918.—­Well, here I am at last, but I fooled them for six months.  Finally one slipped up behind me.  I never saw him, but felt him.  Only got it in the leg, so it isn’t very serious, except that the bullet was incendiary.  They have oodles of sulphur on them and I’m afraid of complications.  This is a nice hospital in a nice location; only thing that I hate about it is that I may not be able to get back to my escradrille for fifteen or twenty days.

SEVERE BOMBING BY GERMANS