noon
And then I remembered that all this glory had only one use in war and that was to help the muddy British infantryman to down his Hun opponent . He was the fellow , after all , that decided battles , and the thought comforted me . A great exhilaration is often the precursor of disaster , and mine was to have a sudden downfall . It was getting on for noon and we were well into England -- I guessed from the rivers we had passed that we were somewhere in the north of Yorkshire -- when the machine began to make odd sounds , and we bumped in perfectly calm patches of air . We dived and then climbed , but the confounded thing kept sputtering . Archie passed back a slip of paper on which he had scribbled : ` Engine conked . Must land at Micklegill .