he soldiers, the low
screams brought the delight of having blows struck from their side at
the enemy, whom they themselves could not strike from their reserve
position.

For we were under the curving sweep of both the British and the
German shells, as they passed in the air on the way to their targets. It
was like standing between two railway tracks with trains going in
opposite directions. You came to differentiate between the
multitudinous screams. "Ours!" you exclaimed, with the same delight
as when you see that your side has the ball. The spirit of battle
contest rose in you. There was an end of philosophy. These soldiers
in the trenches were your partisans. Every British shell was working
for them and for you, giving blow for blow.

The score of the contest of battle is in men down; in killed and
wounded. For every man down on your side you want two men down
on the enemy's. Sport ceases. It is the fight against a burglar with a
revolver in his hand and a knife between his teeth; and a wounded
man brought along the trench, a visible, intimate proof of a hit by the
enemy, calls for more and harder blows.

Looking over the parapet of the communication trench you saw fields,
lifeless except for the singing birds in the wheat, who had also the
spirit of battle. The more shells, the more they warble. It was always
so on summer days. Between the screams you hear their full-pitched
chorus, striving to make itself heard in competition with the song of
German invasion and British resistance. Mostly, the birds seemed to
take cover like mankind; but I saw one sweep up from the golden sea
of ripening grain toward the men-brothers with their wings of cloth.

Was this real, or was it extravaganza? Painted airships and a painted
summer sky? The audacity of those British airmen! Two of them were
spotting the work of British guns by their shell-bursts and watching for
gun-flashes which would reveal concealed German battery-positions,
and whispering results by wireless to their own batteries.

It is a great game. Seven or eight thousand feet high, directly over the
British planes, is a single Taube cruising for the same purpose. It
looks like a beetle with gossamer wings suspended from a light cloud.
The British aviators are so low that the bull's-eye identification marks
are distinctly visible to the naked eye. They are playing in and out, like
the short stop and second baseman around second, there in the very
arc of the passi