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It had been all of nine years since I first met Horne at an estancia house-party in the heart of the Argentine Pampas, and fully seven since I last saw him at a banquet given at the Buenos Aires Jockey Club in his honour, a day or two after he had led his four to victory in the finals of the River Plate polo championships. Yet, in spite of the pallor of a face I had always remembered as bronzed, and a slight hitch in his once swinging gait, I recognised him instantly—it was the keen, piercing glance, I think, and the sudden flash of white teeth in the quick smile—when he hailed me from a passing taxi and came hobbling back along the broad pavement of Whitehall to meet me.

“What does this mean?” I asked, indicating his jaunty Flying Corps uniform, after we had shaken hands. “I thought it was the army you were in before you resigned to become an opulent estanciero and ‘man-about-the-Pampas.’”

“It was the army I came back to,” he replied, “and I was with my old regiment at Neuve Chapelle when a fragment of hand-grenade effected a semi-solution of the continuity of one of my Achilles tendons and put a period on my further usefulness in that branch of the service. The ‘air’ was still open to me, however, and, as I had already dabbled in flying,—I was the first man to pilot an aeroplane across the Plate estuary,—I got a commission almost immediately, and so lost very little time.”

“But your ‘lily-white’ face and hands,” I pressed. “I never heard that the air had a bleaching effect on the complexion.”

“Oh—that—” (Horne looked absently at a blue-veined hand and shuffled uneasily), “that must have come from my spell of ‘C.H.’—confined in hospital. Got knocked up a bit again. Flying over Belgium. Got shot down and hit the edge of Holland a trifle too hard when I volplaned over the boundary. Telescoped a few vertebræ, that’s all. Now, be a good chap and stop asking questions and jump in with me and come along to the Club.”

Horne waited for me while I picked up a few promised figures at the “Lloyd-Georgery,” as he facetiously called the new Ministry of Munitions in Whitehall Gardens, and then took me up to one of the Service clubs in Piccadilly. There, without giving me further chance to “get him up into the air,” he launched at once into news and reminiscence of the Plate and the Pampas. When I left him at six, we had talked for close on two hours without more than the most casual reference to events of the war.

“A keen patriot, like all the rest of these young Britons who have flocked home from overseas to fight for their country,” I reflected as I sauntered down through Green Park; “but certainly not keen on his work.” I even speculated as to whether or not Horne might be in some sort of trouble in the service. Nothing else seemed to account for the man’s reticence regarding everything connected with his special activities.

A few days later Horne called me up to ask me to dine with him that evening at a famous old restaurant in the Strand.

“‘S——’s’ is a bit more ‘merry and bright’ than this old tomb of a Club,” he said, “and a few of the Flying Corps chaps who are in the habit of rendezvousing there while in London on leave you’ll find well worth knowing.”

The gathering was even more informal than I had anticipated. One of the long tables, it appeared, was set aside for “R.F.C.” officers and their friends, and these dropped in by twos and threes, as suited their convenience, all the way from seven to ten o’clock.

There were half-a-dozen men at the table when Horne and I entered, and all of these—they had stalls for a new “revue”—presently took their leave. One of the group was a South African, one a New Zealander, and two Australians. The latter we found bent over the racing page of the Sydney Bulletin, while the New Zealander was evidently trying to persuade the Africander that a dairy herd near Wellington offered better prospects than a general farm in Rhodesia. One of the Australians, whose family was interested in an importing house, lingered behind a moment to ask me if I thought the war was going to force up the price of American agricultural machinery in foreign markets. None of them said a word about flying, and Horne volunteered no more than that they were all “good men—that little chap from New Zealand really ‘topping.’”

Horne, with the fleshpots of Argentina in his mind, ordered solidly and lengthily, and three or four more officers had “wolfed” hasty meals of roast beef and whisky-and-soda before our Chateaubriand (which represents the nearest Anglo-French equivalent to the carne asado of the Pampas) had been done to its proper turn over the coals. These, like the others, rattled on about the music-halls, the homeland, the “rotten London weather”—anything and everything, in fact, save the war in general and the war in the air in particular.

One, it is true,—he had come from France only that afternoon,—in accounting for a bandaged hand, did mention something about getting a finger jammed under the belt of his machine-gun; but it seemed to occur to no one to inquire what he had been shooting at, or whether or not he had hit it, or any of a dozen or so other things concerning which I, for one, was at once consumed with interest.

By nine all of those with theatre or other engagements had come and gone, and the eight or ten still seated at the table were leisurely diners with the evening on their hands. Yet not even among these unhurried ones was there evident any inclination to talk of their work. On the contrary, I fancied I discerned an inclination to avoid, to “side-step” it. When they were reminiscent, it was the friends and events of their old life—“trekking,” “caravanning,” “hiking,” “mushing”; Arctic midnights and tropic dawns; strange odds and ends of adventure by land and sea—that they called up. And when they spoke of the present, it was in connection with little happenings incident to their leaves—with the comparative merits of “kit” shops, Turkish baths, “revue” favourites, the pros and cons of drink restriction, and the extortionate charges of dentists.

Yet every man of them appeared true to what I have since come to recognise as a rapidly-developing type—the “Flying Type.” The army aviator of to-day is picked for his quickness of mind and body, and the first thing that strikes you about him is a sort of feline, wound-up-spring alertness. Then you note his reticence, the cool reserve of a man whose lot it is to express himself in deeds rather than words. And lastly there is the quiet seriousness, verging almost on sadness, of the man who must hold himself ready to look Death between the eyes at any moment, and yet keep his mind detached for other things.

It was the youngest, and therefore the least “formed,” officer of the lot—a lad who had left his cacao plantation in Trinidad to come home and fight—who was responsible for the only “shop” discussion of the evening. Noting that he was eating but little, and constantly passing his hand over his temples, some one asked him banteringly if he was “homesick or only lovesick.”

“Neither,” he answered, relaxing his set lips in a forced smile. “Had a bit of an accident yesterday, and have had a deuce of a headache ever since. Can’t for the life of me make out whether it comes from going up too high or coming down too quick. I went up higher and came down faster than ever before in my experience. Landed all right, but ever since I’ve felt as though I were being blown up by a tire-pump that was driving air into every capillary and nerve-tip. My head feels as though some one was opening up a jack-screw inside of it. Suppose I should have gone to the hospital and found out what was wrong, but I didn’t want to spoil my leave. Maybe some of you chaps can tell me why I feel as though I had to keep holding my head together to stop its flying to pieces,” he concluded, pressing the heels of his hands to his temples to offset the seeming pressure from within.

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?”

“No. It had the heels of all of us. The Hun’s ‘Archies’[2] brought down one of our machines that tried to follow it.”