Lieuts. F. Soden, W. Rutherford, and W. Duncan all distinguished themselves by giving accurate information during these battles, while Selous, a son of the big-game hunter, was also proving himself to be a fine patrol leader and Hun-getter.
The last-named--the worthy son of a famous father--was killed on January 4, 1918, while leading his patrol. He dived at some enemy machines several thousand feet below, and in the middle of his dive, the speed of which the other members of the patrol estimated at not less than 300 miles per hour, the wings of his S.E.5 came right off.
As good a flight commander as ever we had, he was a very great loss to the squadron. Without, perhaps, the brilliance of Ball or Bishop he, like Caldwell, Summers, Armstrong, Hammersley, Chidlaw-Roberts, Belgrave, and Scholte, to name a few only of the best, played always for the squadron, and not for his own hand. He took endless pains to enter young pilots to the game, watching them on their first patrols as a good and patient huntsman watches his young hounds.
The character of Selous, like those whom I have mentioned, not to speak of many others whom their comrades will remember, attained very nearly to the ideal of a gentleman’s character as described by Burke, Newman, and Cavendish in the extracts given below, for which I am indebted to a report by Lord Hugh Cecil on the education of the future R.A.F. officer. These noble sentiments so fully describe the kind of man the British love and admire that it is perhaps not inappropriate to quote them:
“But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.