am afraid to look out of a third-story window.

We made a tour of the station, which had been a great factory before
the war began, beginning with the hangar in which the balloon was now
safely housed.

Entrance to the station is by means of a bridge over a canal. The
bridge is guarded by sentries and the password of the day is necessary
to gain admission. East and west along the canal are canal boats that
have been painted grey and have guns mounted on them. Side by side
with these gunboats are the ordinary canal boats of the region,
serving as homes for that part of the populace which remains, with
women knitting on the decks or hanging out lines of washing overhead.

The endless traffic of a main highroad behind the lines passes the
station day and night. Chauffeurs drop in to borrow petrol or to
repair their cars; visiting officers from other stations come to watch
the airship perform. For England has been slow to believe in the
airships, pinning her aeronautical faith to heavier-than-air machines.
She has considered the great expense for building and upkeep of each
of these dirigible balloons--as much as that of fifty aeroplanes--the
necessity of providing hangars for them, and their vulnerability to
attack, as overbalancing the advantages of long range, silence as they
drift with the wind with engines cut off, and ability to hover over a
given spot and thus launch aerial bombs more carefully.

There is a friendly rivalry between the two branches of the air
service, and so far in this war the credit apparently goes to the
aeroplanes. However, until the war is over, and Germany definitely
states what part her Zeppelins have had in both sea and land attacks,
it will be impossible to make any fair comparison.

The officers at the naval air station had their headquarters in the
administration building of the factory, a long brick building facing
the road. Here in a long room with western windows they rested and
relaxed, lined and talked between their adventurous excursions to the
lines.

Day by day these men went out, some in the airship for a
reconnoissance, others to man observation balloons. Day by day it was
uncertain who would come back.

But they were very cheerful. Officers with an hour to spare came up
from the gunboats in the canal to smoke a pipe by the fire. Once in so
often a woman came, stopping halfway her frozen journey to a soup
kitchen or a railroad station, where she looked after wounded
sold