Lest it should appear that in this book I have worked the personal
pronoun to death, I wish to explain my reasons for describing always my
own feelings, my own experiences, my own thoughts. I feel that the lay
public who did not fly in the war, and knew little of its excitements
and monotonies, would rather hear of the experiences of one person,
related by himself, than merely a journalistic record of events which
had come to his notice. Therefore I have tried faithfully to describe
the sensations, the strange inexplicable fears, the equally inexplicable
fearlessness, of a desk-bound London youth, pitchforked in a moment into
the turmoil of war, and into a hitherto unknown, untried
occupation--bombing at night from the air.
Those who read this book will never see me--I will be to them but a
name--so I feel that my egotism is only an apparent one, and that I am
justified in slightly transgressing the service tradition of personal
silence in order to give as vivid a portrayal as possible of a branch of
war which, in England at any rate, influenced the general public more
than any other.
The fragments of verse quoted at the beginning of each chapter are taken
from the author's poems, 'The Bombing of Bruges,' published by Messrs
Hodder & Stoughton, and 'The Dawn Patrol,' published by Messrs Erskine
Macdonald.