H.E. Bates Companion

The longest of Bates's "Flying Officer X" stories, in eleven numbered sections, contains vivid descriptions and action as a plane is downed in battle, its crew reaches land after sixty hours in a dinghy, and the men reflect on their lives and losses. Two poems bear the same title, one by the eighteenth-century poet William Collins, the other written by the Kentish poet Walter de la Mare in 1916 (and this the more likely source of Bates's title). In How Sleep the Brave and Other Stories (1943), Something in the Air (1944), The Stories of Flying Officer 'X' (1952). Reprinted in Great Flying Stories (1991).