aims at next time. But in the air the man who shoots at you is coming
after you, and intends to go on shooting at you until he kills. The
moment when you see an enemy's plane, and realise that you have to fight
it, must be one to set even the strongest nerves tingling.

Generally the aeroplane with the black crosses on its wings is very
high--barely visible. Sometimes, when the other planes are near it, it
swoops steeply to earth behind the German lines. Or it may be that, far
behind our own lines, you see a plane diving to earth at an angle which
makes you wonder whether it is falling or being steered. It straightens
out suddenly, and lands a few fields away. By the time you are there, a
cluster of khaki is already round it. An English boy steps out of it,
flushed and excited, and with intense strain written in his eyes and in
every jerk of his head. Out of the seat just behind him they are lifting
a man with a terrible wound in his side. In the arms of the seat from
which they lift him are two holes as big as a shell would make--but they
were not made by a shell. A cluster of bullets from the machine-gun of a
German plane at close range has passed in at one side of the seat and
out at the other. The rifle which the observer was carrying dropped from
his hands out into space, and the pilot saw it fall just before he
dived.

The German pilots are sometimes youngsters too--not very unlike our own.
Our first sight of active war in France was when the train stopped at a
country siding many miles behind the lines, and two British soldiers
with fixed bayonets marched a third man--a youngster with a slight fair
moustache--over the level crossing in front of us. He wore a grey peaked
cap and a short overcoat jacket with a warm collar and tall,
tight-fitting boots--very much like those of our own officers; and he
walked with a big, swift stride, looking straight ahead of him.