Someone put a tea-tray on the table beside us, and I looked up to see the very prettiest girl I ever set eyes on.  She seemed little more than a child, and before the war would probably have still ranked as a flapper.  She wore the neat blue dress and apron of a V.A.D. and her white cap was set on hair like spun gold.  She smiled demurely as she arranged the tea-things, and I thought I had never seen eyes at once so merry and so grave.  I stared after her as she walked across the lawn, and I remember noticing that she moved with the free grace of an athletic boy.

‘Who on earth’s that?’ I asked Blaikie.

‘That?  Oh, one of the sisters,’ he said listlessly.  ’There are squads of them.  I can’t tell one from another.’

Nothing gave me such an impression of my friend’s sickness as the fact that he should have no interest in something so fresh and jolly as that girl.  Presently my time was up and I had to go, and as I looked back I saw him sunk in his chair again, his eyes fixed on vacancy, and his hands gripping his knees.

The thought of him depressed me horribly.  Here was I condemned to some rotten buffoonery in inglorious safety, while the salt of the earth like Blaikie was paying the ghastliest price.  From him my thoughts flew to old Peter Pienaar, and I sat down on a roadside wall and read his last letter.  It nearly made me howl.  Peter, you must know, had shaved his beard and joined the Royal Flying Corps the summer before when we got back from the Greenmantle affair.  That was the only kind of reward he wanted, and, though he was absurdly over age, the authorities allowed it.  They were wise not to stickle about rules, for Peter’s eyesight and nerve were as good as those of any boy of twenty.  I knew he would do well, but I was not prepared for his immediately blazing success.  He got his pilot’s certificate in record time and went out to France; and presently even we foot-sloggers, busy shifting ground before the Somme, began to hear rumours of his doings.  He developed a perfect genius for air-fighting.  There were plenty better trick-flyers, and plenty who knew more about the science of the game, but there was no one with quite Peter’s genius for an actual scrap.  He was as full of dodges a couple of miles up in the sky as he had been among the rocks of the Berg.  He apparently knew how to hide in the empty air as cleverly as in the long grass of the Lebombo Flats.  Amazing yarns began to circulate among the infantry about this new airman, who could take cover below one plane of an enemy squadron while all the rest were looking for him.  I remember talking about him with the South Africans when we were out resting next door to them after the bloody Delville Wood business.  The day before we had seen a good battle in the clouds when the Boche plane had crashed, and a Transvaal machine-gun officer brought the report that the British airman had been Pienaar.  ‘Well done, the old takhaar!’ he cried, and