A Soft Job
Diving, climbing, banking, anywhere to get away from those awful shells, and who can give description to the dreadful sensations one undergoes the first time under shrapnel fire in mid-air? Heaven and earth seem to be rent in twain by those murderous little balls of smoke and flame and lead.
One’s past life rises before one’s eyes, sometimes most unpleasantly. Shells burst all round, above, below, to the left, to the right. At one moment over the nose of the machine, the next beneath the tail. Once hit, and the aeroplane and its occupants will plunge down to an agonizing death on the ground, many thousands of feet below.
“And this,” once remarked a cynic of one of the flying Services, “is what the men in the trenches call a soft job.”
By the time we have the opportunity of looking over the side again, we are well into the enemy’s country. In appearance this is an almost absolute replica of the area behind our own lines. There are the reserve trenches; there the big-gun emplacement and the advance hospitals, battalion, brigade and divisional headquarters, and far, very far, in the background, the German G. H. Q.