month of such fighting since the war began, and the losses have never
reached such a tremendous figure," says the _Times_. The record number
so far was that for September 1916, in the height of the Somme
fighting--322. But during April, according to the official reports, "the
enormous number of 717 aeroplanes were brought to earth as the result of
air-fights or by gun-fire." Of these, 369 were German--269 of them
brought down by the British and 98 by the French. The British lost 147;
the French and Belgian, if the German claims can be trusted, 201.

It is a terrible list, and a terrible testimony to the extreme
importance and intensity of the air-fighting now going on. How few of
us, except those who have relatives or dear friends in the air-service,
realise at all the conditions of this fighting--its daring, its epic
range, its constant development!

All the men in it are young. None of them can have such a thing as a
nerve. Anyone who betrays the faintest suspicion of one in his first
flights is courteously but firmly returned to his regiment. In peace the
airman sees this solid earth of ours as no one else sees it; and in war
he makes acquaintance by day and night with all its new and strange
aspects, amid every circumstance of danger and excitement, with death
always at hand, his life staked, not only against the enemy and all his
devices on land and above it, but against wind and cloud, against the
treacheries of the very air itself.

In the midst of these conditions the fighting airman shoots, dodges,
pursues, and dives, intent only on one thing, the destruction of his
enemy, while the observer photographs, marks his map with every
gun-emplacement, railway station, dump of food or ammunition,
unconcerned by the flying shells or the strange dives and swoops of