anes and bombs in Paris,' Barnet relates; 'but
it didn't seem to follow that "They" weren't still somewhere elaborating
their plans and issuing orders. When the enemy began to emerge from the
woods in front of us, we cheered and blazed away, and didn't trouble
much more about anything but the battle in hand. If now and then one
cocked up an eye into the sky to see what was happening there, the rip
of a bullet soon brought one down to the horizontal again....

That battle went on for three days all over a great stretch of country
between Louvain on the north and Longwy to the south. It was essentially
a rifle and infantry struggle. The aeroplanes do not seem to have taken
any decisive share in the actual fighting for some days, though no
doubt they effected the strategy from the first by preventing surprise
movements. They were aeroplanes with atomic engines, but they were not
provided with atomic bombs, which were manifestly unsuitable for field
use, nor indeed had they any very effective kind of bomb. And though
they manoeuvred against each other, and there was rifle shooting at them
and between them, there was little actual aerial fighting. Either
the airmen were indisposed to fight or the commanders on both sides
preferred to reserve these machines for scouting....

After a day or so of digging and scheming, Barnet found himself in the
forefront of a battle. He had made his section of rifle pits chiefly
along a line of deep dry ditch that gave a means of inter-communication,
he had had the earth scattered over the adjacent field, and he had
masked his preparations with tussocks of corn and poppy. The hostile
advance came blindly and unsuspiciously across the fields below and
would have been very cruelly handled indeed, if some one away to the
right had not opened fire too soon.

'It was a queer thrill when these fellows came into sight,' he
confesses; 'and not a bit like manoeuvres. They halted for a time on
the edge of the wood and then came forward in an open line. They kept
walking nearer to us and not looking at us, but away to the right of us.
Even when they began to be hit, and their officers' whistles woke them
up, they didn't seem to see us. One or two halted to fire, and then they
all went back towards the wood again. They went slowly at first, looking
round at us, then the shelter of the wood seemed to draw them, and they
trotted. I fired rather mechanically and missed, then I fired again, and
then I beca