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 By some miracle his old engine kept turning around at about half its normal speed in spite of the fact that one cylinder was gone, another cylinder had a toppet rod shot away, and of course, it was almost white hot with a hole through its crank-case and the oil all gone. He said that his observer blazed away with one machine gun until it jammed, and then turned around to use the other. While he was trying to adjust that one, a bullet caught him between the shoulder blades and he subsided into a little ball in the bottom of the nacelle. Not I want you to picture the nerve and the skill of that boy, all alone in a big clumsy machine, dodging right and left, up and down, knowing that if he tried to climb with his laboring engine he would tail-dive, and that everytime he banked steeply on a sharp turn he would lose height that he could never regain, and every foot nearer the ground brought him closer to the waiting “Archies” and the Hun rifle fire below, with bullets rapidly reducing his planes and framework to bits and expecting every second to be hit himself! Finally he shoved his nose vertically downwards and got into one of those nose-dives which are usually the terror of all pilots, knowing that it was his only chance of shaking off the Fokkers and after a sheer fall of 2000 feet he managed to accumulate enough speed to gradually flatten out and slowly drift over the British lines at a height of less than a thousand feet, much to the delight of the Huns in the trenches who put a few hundred bullets in chase of him as he glided by. There wasn’t a square foot of untouched fabric in the whole machine, half his rudder was shot away, eight shrapnel holes through his propellor, both guns knocked out of business, his observer killed, and his engine a jumble of twisted steel- and yet he didn’t get a scratch. He told me he felt “a bit dazed” when he stepped out of the machine.