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By Root 4536 0

above all, simply: England. Three weeks ago he was still in England, waiting in Pilot's Pool for posting to the front-a certificated stationary engine scout pilot to whom the King had inscribed We Reposing Trust and Confidence in Our Trusty and Well-Beloved Gerald David... but already too late, gazetted not into the RFC but into the RAF. Because the RFC had ceased to exist on April Fool's day, two days before his commission came through: whereupon that March midnight had seemed to him a knell. A door had closed on glory; immortality itself had died in unpnmered anti-climax: not his to be the old commission in the old glorious corps, the brotherhood of heroes to which he had dedicated himself even at the cost of that wrench to his mother's heart; not his the old commission which Albert Ball had earned with him into immortality and which Bishop and Mannock and McCudden still bore in their matchless records, his only the new thing not flesh nor fowl nor good red herring: who had waited one whole year acquiescent to his mother's unrational frantic heart fiercely and irrevocably immune to glory, and then another year in training, working like a beaver, like the very proverbial Trojan, to compensate for his own inability to say no to a woman's tears.

It was too late; those who had invented for him the lingerie Monday pins and the official slacks in place of pink Bedfords and long boots and ordnance belt had closed the door even to the anteroom of heroes. In Valhalla's unnational halls the unnational shades, Frenchman and German and Briton, conqueror and conquered alike-Immelman and Guynemcr, Boelcke and Ball identical not in the vast freemasonry of death but in the closed select one of flying, would clash their bottomless mugs, but not for him. Their inheri-tors-Bishop and Mannock and Voss and McCudden and Fonck and Barker and Richthofen and Nungesser-would still cleave the earth-foundationed air, pacing their fleeing shadows on the scud-ding canyon-walls of cumulae, furloughed and immune, secure in immortality even while they still breathed, but it would not be his. Glory and valor would still exist of course as long as men lived to reap them. It would even be the same valor in fact, but the glory would be another glory. And that would be his: some second form of Elysium, a cut above dead infantry perhaps, but little more: who was not the first to think What had I done for motherland's glory had motherland but matched me with her need.

And now apparently even what remained was to be denied him: three weeks spent in practice, mostly gunnery (he was quite good at it, astonishing even himself), at the aerodrome; one carefully chaperoned trip-the major, Bridesman, his flight commander, himself and one other new and unblooded tyro-up to the lines to show them what they looked like and how to find the way back; and yesterday he was in his hut after lunch trying to compose a letter to his mother when Bridesman thrust his head in and gave him the official notice which he had been waiting for now ever since his seventeenth birthday: 'Levine. Jobs tomorrow. Eleven o'clock. Before we take off, I'll try again to remind you to try to remember what we have been trying to tell you to remember,' Then this morning he had gone up for what would be the last of his unchallenged airy privacy, the farewell to his apprenticeship, what might be called the valedictory of his maidenhood, when the general in the Harry Tate sent him back to earth, to spring down almost before the aeroplane stopped rolling and, spurred again by the mechanic, run to the mess, already the last one, since everyone else was there except the flight which was still out, finding the major already talking, one knee crooked easily across the corner of the table; he (the major) had just got back from Wing Headquarters, where he had met the general commanding, who had come straight from Poperinghe: the French had asked for an armistice; it would go into effect at noon-twelve hours. But it meant nothing: they (the squadron) were to remember that; the British hadn't asked for any armistice,