Readers rejoin Franz Becker and Karl von Leussow in Below us the Front, the sequel to N L Collier’s debut novel, Home Before the Leaves Fall. Having survived the trenches on the Western Front, Franz has joined the Air Service and learns to fly in a fragile, unreliable machine. He passes his pilot’s course and is posted to a two-seater squadron in the east, where he is responsible for flying the slow, vulnerable biplane while his observer takes photographs, drops bombs, and defends them against Russian fighters with their only weapon – a single machine-gun.