Every one stopped talking and leaned forward with interest, and for an instant I thought the curtain was going to drop and reveal something of the experiences, if not the minds, of those khaki-clad sphinxes of the air. Horne’s coldly professional diagnosis dashed the hope. “Altitude,” he pronounced laconically. “Got over twelve thousand, didn’t you? Over thirteen thousand? That accounts for it. And you went up wide-open, trying to take ‘pride of place’ away from a Fokker, I suppose? Of course. And when you got there you began to feel like a deep-sea fish looks when you bring him up out of the kelp-beds and his own air-bladders blow him up? A man can go up fifteen thousand feet by rail or on foot without more than a shortness of breath and occasional nose-bleed. But not every man—and not even every seasoned flyer—can stand jumping up to twelve thousand feet in the half-hour that some of the new machines can negotiate that height in. The difficulty’s almost entirely physical, and it all depends upon how a man is made whether or not his flesh and blood will accommodate themselves to the suddenly reduced pressure of the atmosphere. There’s no growing used to it. If it ‘gets’ you once, it’s pretty sure to do it again. At the best you may only have a bad headache and a sort of ‘boiled-owl’ feeling for a week. At the worst you faint, lose control of your machine, and are listed among the casualties of ’cause unknown.’ Did you lose control, by any chance?”
“I think not,” was the reply. “It was a second German machine—one that I hadn’t seen—that brought me down. It came nose-diving down out of a cloud, shaking its tail, and giving me a regular shower-bath of bullets—the usual Fokker trick. I’m almost positive I can remember all the way down. Fact is, with my machine in the shape that it was after its peppering, any ‘lapse’ on my part would have started it somersaulting at once. No. Rotten as I felt, I’m sure I kept ‘connected up’ mentally all the way down.”
Horne shook his head dubiously. “You may be able to stick it,” he said; “but before you try any more big-game shooting among the high places, best have a few practice flights in the upper empyrean. The sooner a man learns his altitude limit the better. There’s plenty of useful work below twelve thousand feet for the man who begins to ‘blow-up’—mentally or physically—above that height.”
Conversation became general again even before Horne had finished speaking, for to most of them there was nothing new in what he was saying. None but the man on the left of the young West Indian ventured an inquiry as to the details of what had happened, and it was only by straining my ears that I was able to catch the drift of the low-voiced, almost monosyllabic exchange.
“Get your petrol tank?”
“No, for a wonder. Got about everything else, though. Propeller all chewed up; wings a pair of sieves. Bumped the bumps all the way down. Ground was about the softest thing I hit.”
“Any one get the Hun?”
“None of us. Got himself, though. He came breezing out of a tuft of cirro-cumuli all of fifteen thousand feet up, and seemed to be going wild; sort of running amuck. Seemed to be trying to ram me when he nose-dived, and the reason he bored me so full of holes was that he didn’t sheer off to give me a berth. Missed me by a hair, and almost upset me with his wind. But he never recovered from his dive. Just seemed to lose control and started going end over end. Fell almost into some of our trenches. I landed five miles away from the wreck of him with nothing shot up but my machine and my nerves.”
“Any one get the first machine—the one you went up after?”