feet existed. Nor would he ever again have the strength to drag his
shattered body to where the rifle lay. Only a few yards away lay
speedy happy release.

"No such thing as luck, Damocles."

Perhaps the vultures thought otherwise.

Colonel John Decies, still of Bimariabad, but long retired on pension
from the Indian Medical Service, was showing his mental and physical
unfitness for the service of the Government that had ordered his
retirement, by devoting himself at the age of fifty-nine to
aviation--aviation in the interests of the wounded on the battlefield.
What he wanted to live to see was a flying stretcher-service of the
Royal Army Medical Corps that should flash to and fro at the rate of a
hundred miles an hour between the rear of the firing-line and the
field hospital and base hospital in aeroplanes built especially for
the accommodation of wounded men--an officer of the Corps accompanying
each in the dual capacity of surgeon and potential pilot. When he
allowed his practical mind to wander among the vast possibilities of
the distant future, he dreamed of bigger and bigger aeroplanes until
they became fully equipped flying hospitals themselves, and removed
the wounded from the danger zone to the nearest salubrious spot for
their convalescence. Meanwhile, he saw no reason why the more powerful
biplanes should not carry an operating-table and all surgical
accessories, a surgeon, and two or three wounded men who could not be
made sitting-up cases.

To Colonel John Decies it seemed that if soldiers schemed to adapt the
flying-machine to purposes of death and destruction, doctors might do