The Diver leaned close and yelled in Dicky's ear: "Didn't I crash—one—too?" Dicky blew again. "No, I didn't crash two," he said. "Only one, I saw, though there was another blighter——"
Blanky turned disgustedly to the Major. "They're crazy," he said. "I know I didn't see one single unholy Hun crashed in the whole sinful show."
"Between them they claim five," said the Major, "and you say none. What about yourself? Didn't you get any?"
"No," said Blanky shortly. "One or two down out of control, but I didn't watch 'em, and they probably straightened out lower down." (Blanky, it may be mentioned, has a record of never having claimed a single Hun crashed, but is credited, nevertheless, with a round dozen from entirely outside evidence.)
The Major spent another noisy three minutes trying to sift the tangled evidence and claims of crashes, then gave it up. "Write your reports," he said, "and we'll have to wait and see if any confirmation comes in of any crashes. You were near enough to the line for crashes to be seen, weren't you?"
"Near enough?" said Blanky. "Too disgustingly near. I suppose anyone that knows a bus from a banana would recognise the make of ours, and I'm rank ashamed to imagine what the whole blinking line must have thought of the Squadron and the paralysed performance."
The bir-r-r of the telephone bell cut sharply through the noisy talk, and the Major shouted for silence. He got it at last, and the room listened to the one-sided conversation that followed. Some of the men continued their talk in whispers, Blanky fumbled out and lit a cigarette, Dicky dropped on the bed beside the man with the book, who, through all the uproar, had kept his eyes glued to the magazine pages. "What you got there?" asked Dicky conversationally. "Any good?"
"Good enough for me to want to read," snapped the other. "But a man couldn't read in this row if he was stone deaf."
"Well, y'see, they're all a bit bucked with the scrap," said Dicky apologetically.