S.O. seemed in the eyes of the doer to degrade the honour!
* * * * *
With this true tale I have come back to a recollection of the words of
the flying officer in charge of the aerodrome mentioned in my second
letter, after he had described to me the incessant raiding and fighting
of our airmen behind the enemy lines.
"Many of them don't come back. What then? _They will have done their
job._"
The report which reaches the chateau on our last evening illustrates
this casual remark. It shows that 89 machines were lost during February,
60 of them German. We claimed 41 of these, and 23 British machines were
"missing" or "brought down."
But as I write the concluding words of this letter (May 3rd) a far more
startling report--that for April--lies before me. "There has not been a
month of such fighting since the war began, and the losses have never
reached such a tremendous figure," says the _Times_. The record number
so far was that for September 1916, in the height of the Somme
fighting--322. But during April, according to the official reports, "the
enormous number of 717 aeroplanes were brought to earth as the result of
air-fights or by gun-fire.
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