‘Better get off, my lad,’ I said.  ‘These look like my friends.’

The engine started and the mechanics stood clear.  As we taxied over the turf I looked back and saw several figures running in our direction.  The next second we had left the bumpy earth for the smooth highroad of the air.

I had flown several dozen times before, generally over the enemy lines when I wanted to see for myself how the land lay.  Then we had flown low, and been nicely dusted by the Hun Archies, not to speak of an occasional machine-gun.  But never till that hour had I realized the joy of a straight flight in a swift plane in perfect weather.  Archie didn’t lose time.  Soon the hangars behind looked like a child’s toys, and the world ran away from us till it seemed like a great golden bowl spilling over with the quintessence of light.  The air was cold and my hands numbed, but I never felt them.  As we throbbed and tore southward, sometimes bumping in eddies, sometimes swimming evenly in a stream of motionless ether, my head and heart grew as light as a boy’s.  I forgot all about the vexations of my job and saw only its joyful comedy.  I didn’t think that anything on earth could worry me again.  Far to the left was a wedge of silver and beside it a cluster of toy houses.  That must be Edinburgh, where reposed my portmanteau, and where a most efficient police force was now inquiring for me.  At the thought I laughed so loud that Archie must have heard me.  He turned round, saw my grinning face, and grinned back.  Then he signalled to me to strap myself in.  I obeyed, and he proceeded to practise ’stunts’—­the loop, the spinning nose-dive, and others I didn’t know the names of.  It was glorious fun, and he handled his machine as a good rider coaxes a nervous horse over a stiff hurdle.  He had that extra something in his blood that makes the great pilot.

Presently the chessboard of green and brown had changed to a deep purple with faint silvery lines like veins in a rock.  We were crossing the Border hills, the place where I had legged it for weary days when I was mixed up in the Black Stone business.  What a marvellous element was this air, which took one far above the fatigues of humanity!  Archie had done well to change.  Peter had been the wise man.  I felt a tremendous pity for my old friend hobbling about a German prison-yard, when he had once flown a hawk.  I reflected that I had wasted my life hitherto.  And then I remembered that all this glory had only one use in war and that was to help the muddy British infantryman to down his Hun opponent.  He was the fellow, after all, that decided battles, and the thought comforted me.