I thought it must be ... you know ... there’s a connecting pipe. There wasn’t much flame.”

He stopped, and his lower lip came forward while he turned it over in his mind. It seemed to him important to be able to tell us whether the flames were high or Were not high. He hesitated: “But still, flame is flame. The inter-com was working, and I told the crew they’d better jump.”

In less than ten seconds a plane can turn into a torch.

“Then I opened my escape hatch. I shouldn’t have done that. It let in the air ... and the flame, you know.... I was sorry I’d done it.”

You have a locomotive boiler spitting a torrent of flame at you, twenty thousand feet in the air, and you are sorry you’ve done something. I shall not play Sagon false by talking of his heroism or his modesty. He would not recognize himself in these terms. He would insist that he was sorry he had done it. As we stood round his bed it was plain that he was making a concentrated effort to be precise.

The field of consciousness is tiny. It accepts only one problem at a time. Get into a fist fight, put your mind on the strategy of the fight, and you will not feel the other fellow’s punches. Once, when I thought I was about to drown in a seaplane accident, the freezing water seemed to me tepid. Or, more exactly, my consciousness was not concerned with the temperature of the water. It was absorbed by other thoughts. The temperature of the water has left no trace in my memory. In the same way, Sagon’s consciousness was filled to the brim with the problem of getting away from the plane. His universe was limited successively to the fate of his crew, the handle that governed the sliding hatch, the rip cord of the parachute.

The inter-com seemed to be working. “Are you there?” he had called out.

No answer.

“Nobody on board?” he had asked again.

No answer.

They must have jumped, Sagon had decided. And as he was sorry about those flames (his hands and face were already burnt), he had got out of his seat, climbed out on the fuselage, and crawled forward along the surface of the wing.

“I peered in. I couldn’t see the observer.”

The observer, killed instantly by the German fighters, had slumped down out of sight.

“Then I backed up and looked for the gunner. I couldn’t see him, either.”

But the same thing had happened to the gunner.

“I thought they must have jumped.”

Once again Sagon turned the matter over in his mind.

“If I had known, I could have crawled back into the cockpit. The flames were not so high. I lay there on the wing, I don’t know how long. I had stabilized the plane at an angle before crawling out.