uniform. Already he had been cited for bringing down three enemy planes. He was recovering from a severe wound, and while convalescing in America was giving some of his time to platform work.

Again and again the men at his table (it was a dinner affair) urged him to tell of one of his battles. He was reluctant to do so. His consent was finally secured, but only after pressure that was hardly allowable had been brought to bear.

The tale was told without the slightest attempt at oratorical effect. He described his success in outmanœuvring his opponent, or rather his two opponents, for two men were in the enemy plane; the buckling of the German machine; the shooting of the observer from his seat, and how he hurtled through the air; the explosion and the fire. Then he said, "I stopped there in the sky, and all that I could think was, 'Do they feel it?'"

The lad's eyes—for his face and his years were those of a lad, though he had done already a man's stern work—were wistful as he spoke. These men are not killers.

But it was not at the front that I found the horror of aërial warfare. One afternoon I stepped from the American Y. M. C. A. headquarters in London, at 47 Russell Square, walked a little way, and found stones red with the blood of children. When I left Europe, not a single military objective had been found by an aërial bomb in all the raids over the capital of the United Kingdom. In the very nature of things it is not likely that a bomb will reach such an objective. The night-raider must have a large target. Twenty minutes sees him across the Channel and at the estuary of the Thames. He follows the silver trail into the heart of the city, and drops his "eggs." But of course a military programme is not intended. Imperial Germany built her aërial plans about the theory that terrorizing a people will destroy a nation's morale.

But Imperial Germany blundered again. Early one morning, following the sounding of the "all-clear" signals, a great company crowded against the ropes that the omnipresent "Bobby" had thrown about a lodging-house. Many murdered and maimed had been left behind by the Bluebeard of Berlin. A gray-haired man was lifted by the carriers. Surely he was dead; the top of his head was like a red, red poppy. But no. He raised his thin, white hand, and waved it feebly to the crowd below. Such a roar went up from that multitude as man seldom hears,—the roar of the female lion standing over her cubs.

One night I reached Paris simultaneously with an air-raid warning. Later I stood—very foolishly, but I was ignorant of the danger then—on the roof of the Gibraltar Hotel, and watched first the star shells and the barrage at the city's edge, the flashing of the signals from the defending planes, and the long arms of the mighty searchlights as they policed the sky. So effective were the French that night that the enemy got no farther than the suburbs.

Many excruciatingly funny things happen during a raid, as for instance the raising of an umbrella by a gentleman who suddenly found shrapnel falling about him. He kept it up, too, while he galloped straight down the middle of the street instead of finding cover.

A very prominent gentleman, who is a friend of the writer, had been looking forward with some misgivings to his wartime trip abroad. He found his first night in Paris enlivened by a visit from Germany. He had made diligent inquiry and learned the exact location of the abri, had several times traversed the route between his room and the cellar, and had been particular to make himself familiar with the signals of alarm. He was restless when he first retired; but the long and wearisome journey was a sure sleep-producer, and it was out of profound slumber that the whistle and cries awoke him.

You may be sure that he lost no time in getting under headway; he even forgot his dressing-gown and the slippers by the side of his bed. He sacrificed all impedimenta for speed. I do not know whether he used the banisters or not, but I have reason to believe that nothing was left undone to cover the maximum of distance in the minimum of time. Afterwards he remembered the amazed countenances of the people in the halls as he flashed by. However, their indifference (indeed, they were not even bound in the direction of the cellar) did not deter him. What he regarded as carelessness due to long exposure and many similar experiences did not blind him to the obligations he owed to his own family and profession.