The grey came in overnight — proper Flanders weather, the sort that turns the whole front into a bad watercolour. I went up as part of the morning offensive sweep above the Salient, orders to keep the enemy's eyes off our batteries while the infantry readied their positions below. At eight thousand feet the cold had my hands nearly useless and the castor oil smell was thick in the cockpit when I found him — a Fokker triplane, red and purposeful, climbing fast from a gap in the cloud with the sun, such as it was, somewhere behind him. Four passes we made of it, each tighter than the last, his machine turning inside mine until the moment he forgot what he was up against. A Camel pilot never forgets her right-hand snap — the torque is as much a part of you as your trigger finger — but your enemy sometimes does, and when he does you make him pay. My guns found him on the fifth pass. He went down over the Belgian mud — not in flames, just going down, slowly and with a sort of dignity. I watched him until the overcast took him, then turned for home with the archie thumping away below me, entirely indifferent to the small matter just concluded above it.