It flaunts itself up and down once or twice, as if to say: "Now look, everybody, I'm going to be clever." Then it goes mad.

It leaps upon imaginary Boches, it stands upon its head and falls downward until the very butterflies begin to take cover, it stands upon its tail and falls upward, it writes messages in a flowing hand across the sky and returns to cross the t's.

It circles impertinently round your head, fixing its bold tricolour eye upon you until you begin to think there must be something wrong with your appearance.

It bounds upon a field of onions and rebounds in the same breath from the topmost cloud of heaven.
The rooks return disconsolately to their nests.
Then you may see the erring machine suddenly remember itself, and check itself in the act of some new paroxysm.

It remembers the European War that gave it birth; it thinks of its mates scanning the sky for its coming; its frivolity ebbs suddenly.