You jumped at the Imp but he was too quick for you.  His gun flashed and you were briefly in agony, then unconscious....

To all intents and purposes it was a routine flight, crossing your own lines, then the enemy's, and looking out for undue troop-concentrations which could mean trouble.  This, after all, was The War To End All Wars, and it was your intention to do all you could to see that your side won.  It had started in a blaze of patriotism in 1914 and had not taken too long to descend into a carnage of horror, as first one side, then the other gained a few yards of territory at a terrible cost in human lives.

Gone was the idealism and the heroism of fighting for one's country.  All that remained was the bitter and ugly existence of the troops in the trenches beneath you, struggling as they were against mud, rats, machine guns, rifles, constant shelling and a realization that the Germans were as determined to win as was your own side.  Not that the generalship was all that good, either.  It took a special sort of person to order thousands of men to walk to their deaths on barbed wire and into a veritable storm of bullets.  But neither side was in short supply of those special men.

You tilted your biplane and looked pityingly down on the trenches.  You could see the shell-bursts and the wave of men advancing on the German trenches.  You could hear nothing over the racket of your engine, but many of the figures beneath you had stopped moving and you knew full well why.

Even for you in the Royal Flying Corps this war was becoming intolerable.  Your comrades were gaunt and hollow-eyed from stress and lack of sleep, added to which was the knowledge that they could very well take off at dawn and never be heard of again.  The 'planes were not all that reliable either - patch-up jobs from previous battles and tended by mechanics quite as tired as the pilots.  More that, once you had made a harrowing return as your engine developed a fault.  All you could do was carry on and hope that there would be an end to it one day.

This was what threatened you now, because there was a glinting in the sky ahead and you were being appoached by three German aircraft.  They were also of the fast variety, which you were not.  You heeled over and headed back, running for cover, as ordered.

But there was no outrunning them.  They were coming up fast behind you.  Your chances were growing slighter by the minute.  You leaned forward and yanked back the bolts of your two machine-guns.  This finally looked as though it might be your turn.

Since you could not outrun them there was only one thing for you to do.  You turned back and headed straight for them.  It might well be that they would send you down but you had every intention of taking at least one of them with you.

As you expected, they split, one peeling off to the left, one to the right and the other coming in head-on.  It was an old trick, and you had seen it often enough before.  One took you on while the others waited for an opportunity to take you from the side or the rear.

But you were not going to accept that.  You decided on the one to the left, flipped your 'plane over and raced in at it.  As you had hoped, he had been relying upon your inexperience, and experience was one thing in which you were not lacking.  There were enough lines on your young face to bear that out.

And there he was, totally unprepared and lined up directly in your sights.  You had outfoxed him.  Without hesitation you squeeezed both triggers and poured bullets into him.  The pilot reared up in his cockpit and oil belched from his engine.  He was finished.

Immediately you straightened your craft then drove it up into a climb.  But you were not good enough.  Bullets tore into your 'plane from behind - and then some found you.  Your mission was over.

Bad luck on that one.
To find out what might have happened go to 17.