Flick! a bullet!
Wiser counsels came to Peter. This was no place for a sick and giddy man with a smashed and bleeding wrist. He must get away.
Up! Which way was west? West? The sun rises in the east and sets in the west. But where had the sun got to? It was hidden by his wing. Shadows! The shadows would be pointing north-east, that was the tip.... Up! There were the Boche trenches. No, Boche reserve trenches.... Going west, going west.... Rip! Snap! Bullet through the wing, and a wire flickering about. He ducked his head.... He put the machine up steeply to perhaps a thousand feet....
He had an extraordinary feeling that he and the machine were growing and swelling, that they were getting bigger and bigger, and the sky and the world and everything else smaller. At last he was a monstrous man in a vast aeroplane in the tiniest of universes. He was as great as God.
That wrist! And this blood! Blood! And great, glowing spots of blood that made one’s sight indistinct....
He coughed, and felt his mouth full of blood, and spat it out and retched....
Then in an instant he was a little thing again, and the sky and the world were immense. He had a lucid interval.
One ought to go up and help that Frenchman. Where were they fighting?... Up, anyhow!
This must be No Man’s Land. That crumpled little thing was a dead body surely. Barbed wire. More barbed wire.
The engine was missing. Ugh! That fairly put the lid on!