tenant. "They are very good horses."

Later on I stopped to stroke the soft nose of a black horse as it
stood trembling near a battery of heavy guns that was firing steadily.
It was American too. On its flank there was a Western brand. I gave it
an additional caress, and talked a little American into one of its
nervous, silky ears. We were both far from home, a trifle bewildered,
a bit uneasy and frightened.

And now it was the battlefield--the flat, muddy plain of Ypres. On the
right bodies of men, sheltered by intervening groves and hedges, moved
about. Dispatch riders on motor cycles flew along the roads, and over
the roof of a deserted farmhouse an observation balloon swung in the
wind. Beyond the hedges and the grove lay the trenches, and beyond
them again German batteries were growling. Their shells, however, were
not bursting anywhere near us.

The balloon was descending. I asked permission to go up in it, but
when I saw it near at hand I withdrew the request. It had no basket,
like the ones I had seen before, but instead the observers, two of
them, sat astride a horizontal bar.

The English balloons have a basket beneath, I am told. One English
airship man told me that to be sent up in a stationary balloon was the
greatest penalty a man could be asked to pay. The balloon jerks at the
end of its rope like a runaway calf, and "the resulting nausea makes
sea-sickness seem like a trip to the Crystal Palace."

So I did not go up in that observation balloon on the field of Ypres.
We got out of the car, and trudged after the balloon as it was carried
to its new position by many soldiers. We stood by as it rose again
above the tree tops, the rope and the telephone wire hanging beneath
it. But what the observers saw that afternoon from their horizontal
bar I do not yet know--trenches, of course. But trenches are
interesting in this war only when their occupants have left them and
started forward. Batteries and ammunition trains, probably, the latter
crawling along the enemy's roads. But both of these can be better and
more easily located by aeroplanes.

The usefulness of the captive balloon in this war is doubtful. It
serves, at the best, to take the place of an elevation of land in this
flat country, is a large and tempting target, and can serve only on
very clear days, when there is no ground mist--a difficult thing to
achieve in Flanders.

We were getting closer to the front all the time. As the automobile
jo