roadside wall and read his last letter. It nearly made me howl.
Peter, you must know, had shaved his beard and joined the
Royal Flying Corps the summer before when we got back from the
Greenmantle affair. That was the only kind of reward he wanted,
and, though he was absurdly over age, the authorities allowed it.
They were wise not to stickle about rules, for Peter's eyesight and
nerve were as good as those of any boy of twenty. I knew he would
do well, but I was not prepared for his immediately blazing success.
He got his pilot's certificate in record time and went out to France;
and presently even we foot-sloggers, busy shifting ground before
the Somme, began to hear rumours of his doings. He developed a
perfect genius for air-fighting. There were plenty better trick-flyers,
and plenty who knew more about the science of the game, but
there was no one with quite Peter's genius for an actual scrap. He
was as full of dodges a couple of miles up in the sky as he had been
among the rocks of the Berg. He apparently knew how to hide in
the empty air as cleverly as in the long grass of the Lebombo Flats.
Amazing yarns began to circulate among the infantry about this
new airman, who could take cover below one plane of an enemy
squadron while all the rest were looking for him. I remember
talking about him with the South Africans when we were out
resting next door to them after the bloody Delville Wood business.
The day before we had seen a good battle in the clouds when the
Boche plane had crashed, and a Transvaal machine-gun officer
brought the report that the British airman had been Pienaar. 'Well
done, the old _takhaar!' he cried, and 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