started to yarn about Peter’s methods.  It appeared that Peter had a theory that every man has a blind spot, and that he knew just how to find that blind spot in the world of air.  The best cover, he maintained, was not in cloud or a wisp of fog, but in the unseeing patch in the eye of your enemy.  I recognized that talk for the real thing.  It was on a par with Peter’s doctrine of ‘atmosphere’ and ’the double bluff’ and all the other principles that his queer old mind had cogitated out of his rackety life.

By the end of August that year Peter’s was about the best-known figure in the Flying Corps.  If the reports had mentioned names he would have been a national hero, but he was only ‘Lieutenant Blank’, and the newspapers, which expatiated on his deeds, had to praise the Service and not the man.  That was right enough, for half the magic of our Flying Corps was its freedom from advertisement.  But the British Army knew all about him, and the men in the trenches used to discuss him as if he were a crack football-player.  There was a very big German airman called Lensch, one of the Albatross heroes, who about the end of August claimed to have destroyed thirty-two Allied machines.  Peter had then only seventeen planes to his credit, but he was rapidly increasing his score.  Lensch was a mighty man of valour and a good sportsman after his fashion.  He was amazingly quick at manoeuvring his machine in the actual fight, but Peter was supposed to be better at forcing the kind of fight he wanted.  Lensch, if you like, was the tactician and Peter the strategist.  Anyhow the two were out to get each other.  There were plenty of fellows who saw the campaign as a struggle not between Hun and Briton, but between Lensch and Pienaar.

The 15th September came, and I got knocked out and went to hospital.  When I was fit to read the papers again and receive letters, I found to my consternation that Peter had been downed.  It happened at the end of October when the southwest gales badly handicapped our airwork.  When our bombing or reconnaissance jobs behind the enemy lines were completed, instead of being able to glide back into safety, we had to fight our way home slowly against a head-wind exposed to Archies and Hun planes.  Somewhere east of Bapaume on a return journey Peter fell in with Lensch—­at least the German Press gave Lensch the credit.  His petrol tank was shot to bits and he was forced to descend in a wood near Morchies.  ‘The celebrated British airman, Pinner,’ in the words of the German communique, was made prisoner.

I had no letter from him till the beginning of the New Year, when I was preparing to return to France.  It was a very contented letter.  He seemed to have been fairly well treated, though he had always a low standard of what he expected from the world in the way of comfort.  I inferred that his captors had not identified in the brilliant airman the Dutch miscreant who a year before had broken out of a German jail.  He had discovered the pleasures of reading and had perfected himself in an art which he had once practised indifferently.  Somehow or other he had got a Pilgrim’s Progress, from which he seemed to extract enormous pleasure.  And then at the end, quite casually, he mentioned that he had been badly wounded and that his left leg would never be much use again.