FACING
PAGE

The Hosts of the Air, Frontispiece

"Once they came to the very edge of the trench to be slain there" 28

"'You! You! Is it really you?' she cried" 260

"Now the aeroplanes flew at almost incredible speed,
the _Arrow_ always at their head", 332





CHAPTER I

THE TRENCH


A young man was shaving. His feet rested upon a broad plank embedded in
mud, and the tiny glass in which he saw himself hung upon a wall of raw,
reeking earth. A sky, somber and leaden, arched above him, and now and
then flakes of snow fell in the sodden trench, but John Scott went on
placidly with his task.

The face that looked back at him had been changed greatly in the last
six months. The smoothness of early youth was gone--for the time--and