The other aeroplanes, far above, had lost their semblance to mechanical man-driven machines.  They were now the eagles of the air.  They were rising, circling, diving in maneuvers that Dorn knew meant pursuit.  But he could not understand these movements.  To him the air-battle looked as it must have looked to an Indian.  Birds of prey in combat!  Dorn recalled verses he had learned as a boy, written by a poet who sang of future wars in the air.  What he prophesied had come true.  Was there not a sage now who could pierce the veil of the future and sing of such a thing as sacred human life?  Dorn had his doubts.  Poets and dreamers appeared not to be the men who could halt materialism.  Strangely then, as Dorn gazed bitterly up at these fierce fliers who fought in the heavens, he remembered the story of the three wise men and of Bethlehem.  Was it only a story?  Where on this sunny spring morning was Christ, and the love of man for man?

At that moment one of the forward aeroplanes, which was drifting back over the enemy lines, lost its singular grace of slow, sweeping movement.  It poised in the air.  It changed shape.  It pitched as if from wave to wave of wind.  A faint puff of smoke showed.  Tiny specks, visible to Dorn’s powerful eyes, seemed to detach themselves and fall, to be followed by the plane itself in sheer downward descent.

Dorn leaped to his feet.  What a thrilling and terrible sight!  His comrades stood bareheaded, red faces uplifted, open-mouthed and wild with excitement, not daring to disobey orders and yell at the top of their lungs.  Dorn felt, strong above the softened wonder and thought of a moment back, a tingling, pulsating wave of gushing blood go over him.  Like his comrades, he began to wave his arms and stamp and bite his tongue.

Swiftly the doomed plane swept down out of sight.  Gone!  At that instant something which had seemed like a bird must have become a broken mass.  The other planes drifted eastward.

Dorn gasped, and broke the spell on him.  He was hot and wet with sweat, quivering with a frenzy.  How many thousand soldiers of the Allies had seen that downward flight of the boche?  Dorn pitied the destroyed airman, hated himself, and had all the fury of savage joy that had been in his comrades.

* * * * *

Dorn, relieved from guard and firing-post, rushed back to the dugout.  He needed the dark of that dungeon.  He crawled in and, searching out the remotest, blackest corner, hidden from all human eyes, and especially his own, he lay there clammy and wet all over, with an icy, sickening rend, like a wound, in the pit of his stomach.  He shut his eyes, but that did not shut out what he saw. “So help me God!” he whispered to himself....  Six endless months had gone to the preparation of a deed that had taken one second!  That transformed him!  His life on earth, his spirit in the beyond, could never be now what they might have been.  And he sobbed through grinding teeth as he felt the disintegrating, agonizing, irremediable forces at work on body, mind, and soul.