CHAPTER I
A KNIGHT OUT
Yes, I certainly was feeling depressed.
I don’t think that this was altogether the reaction
of the day. Of course, there always is a reaction after
the excitement of a flight; but the effect is more
physical than moral. One doesn’t talk. One lies about
and smokes and drinks champagne.
No, I was feeling quite a different kind of rotten.
I looked at my mind, as the better class of flying man
soon learns to do, and I really felt ashamed of myself.
Take me for all in all, I was one of the luckiest men
alive.
War is like a wave; some it rolls over, some it
drowns, some it beats to pieces on the shingle; but
some it shoots far up the shore on to glistening golden
sand out of the reach of any further freaks of fortune.
Let me explain.
My name is Peter Pendragon. My father was a
second son; and he had quarrelled with my Uncle
Mortimer when they were boys. He was a struggling
general practitioner in Norfolk, and had not made
things any better for himself by marrying.
However, he scraped together enough to get me some
sort of education, and at the outbreak of the war I
was twenty-two years old and had just passed my
Intermediate for M.D. in the University of London.
Then, as I said, the wave came. My mother went
out for the Red Cross, and died in tbe first year of the
war. Such was the confusion that I did not even
know about it till over six months later.
My father died of influenza just before the Armistice.
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