To-day I shared another chap's machine (Hill of Peekskill), and got it shot up for him. De Laage (our lieutenant) and I made a sortie at noon. When over the German lines, near Côte 304, I saw two Boches under me. I picked out the rear chap and dived. Fired a few shots and then tried to get under his tail and hit him from there. I missed, and bobbed up alongside of him. Fine for the Boche, but rotten for me! I could see his gunner working the mitrailleuse for fair, and felt his bullets darn close. I dived, for I could not shoot from that position, and beat it. He kept plunking away and altogether put seven holes in my machine. One was only ten inches in from me. De Laage was too far off to get to the Boche and ruin him while I was amusing him.
Yesterday I motored up to an aviation camp to see a Boche machine that had been forced to land and was captured. On the way up I passed a cantonment of Senegalese. About twenty of 'em jumped up from the bench they were sitting on and gave me the hell of a salute. Thought I was a general because I was riding in a car, I guess. They're the blackest niggers you ever saw. Good-looking soldiers. Can't stand shelling but they're good on the cold steel end of the game. The Boche machine was a beauty. Its motor is excellent and she carries a machine gun aft and one forward. Same kind of a machine I attacked to-day. The German pilots must be mighty cold-footed, for if the Frenchmen had airplanes like that they surely would raise the devil with the Boches.
As it is the Boches keep well within their lines, save occasionally, and we have to go over and fight them there.
KIFFIN ROCKWELL
Poor Kiffin Rockwell has been killed. He was known and admired far and wide, and he was accorded extraordinary honours. Fifty English pilots and eight hundred aviation men from the British unit in the Vosges marched at his funeral. There was a regiment of Territorials and a battalion of Colonial troops in addition to the hundreds of French pilots and aviation men. Captain Thénault of the American Escadrille delivered an exceptionally eulogistic funeral oration. He spoke at length of Rockwell's ideals and his magnificent work. He told of his combats. "When Rockwell was on the lines," he said, "no German passed, but on the contrary was forced to seek a refuge on the ground."
Rockwell made the esprit of the escadrille, and the Captain voiced the sentiments of us all when, in announcing his death, he said: "The best and bravest of us all is no more."
How does the war look to you--as regards duration? We are figuring on about ten more months, but then it may be ten more years. Of late things are much brighter and one can feel a certain elation in the air. Victory, before, was a sort of academic certainty; now, it's felt.