"No. This is the first we have seen of you. Oh! I am glad you are all right. Where's Roy?"
"Roy! Roy! Oh! He's dead, dead—dead—in the sea—drowned in the wreck...." And throwing myself on a seat, I drop my face on to my arms on the table and burst into sobs, which shake my weary frame to the bones as the scalding tears well from my tired bruised eyes.
Follows in my memory picture after picture—of lying for a few hours in my little bed in the familiar cabin at the aerodrome, and of Jimmy bending over me with his face drawn with anxiety, telling me of the tragedy of the night, of Bob and Jack missing, of machines crashing: of the Friends Hospital at Dunkerque in a little wood where we awoke at dawn to hear the thunder of the 15-inch shells bursting on the docks: of the Red Cross city at Étaples: of yet another hospital in the green silence of Eton Square: of convalescence in the dream-garden of a great house in Buckinghamshire.
One night I rode into Paddington and found Jack Hudson awaiting me. Three months was it since I had dined with him on the tragic night of April 10. He told me how, an hour after my accident, he had landed with a shell-shattered engine in Holland; he had struck a canal at 75 miles an hour, and had been upside down under water with his feet fixed on the wreckage, and his machine had caught fire on top of him, and how by burrowing down into the mud he had managed to free himself and to escape. Unchanged by our experiences which we related as interesting stories, we wandered happily along the twilight streets.
Infinitely remote, like a scarce-remembered dream, is the war to me to-day. I seem ever to have been a civilian, ever to have strolled at ease down sunlit terraces of London through the drowsy hours of an English spring—but every night with the slow approach of azure twilight I feel a strange stirring in my heart. As the first primrose star blooms in the east, I seem to hear the roar of starting engines, and when, in cold and sublime beauty, a silver moon rides high in the vast immensity of the night, I yearn with an almost unbearable pain to be once more sitting far above a magic moonlit world, to be moving ever onwards through the dim sky, where here and there the white waiting arms of the searchlights swoop and linger amidst the stars; where, beautiful and enchanted, there rises in the distance a long curving chain of green twinkling balls.
Dusk is our dawn, and midnight is our noon!
And for the sun we have the radiant moon.
We love the darkness, and we hate the light,
For we are wedded to the gloomy night.
X.
WITH A KITE BALLOON AT THE DARDANELLES.
"Show a leg! Show a leg! Rise up and shine! Lash up and stow! The sun's burning your bloomin' eyes out!"