" as the official reports call it, the sort of thing
that goes on day after day.

Somebody wanted to walk on to the desolate village which raised its
smashed walls a few hundred yards down the road. The tall young officer
said that this might not be done--it would draw the enemy's fire, and as
if to accent this advice there was a sudden Bang! and the corner of one
of the houses we were looking at collapsed in a cloud of dust.

Under these wailing parabolas, swinging invisibly across from horizon to
horizon, we withdrew behind the farmhouse for lunch--sandwiches,
frankfurters kept hot in a fireless cooker, and red wine--when far
overhead a double-decker English aeroplane suddenly sailed over us. It
seemed to be about six thousand feet above us, so high that the sound of
its motors was lost, and its speed seemed but a lazy, level drifting
across the blue. Did it take those three motor-cars and those little
dots for some reconnoitring division commander and his staff? Aeroplanes
not only drop bombs, but signal to their friends; there was an
uncomfortable amount of artillery scattered about the country, and we
watched with peculiar interest the movements of this tiny hawk.

But already other guns, as hidden as those that might be threatening us,
had come, as it were, to the rescue. A little ball of black smoke
suddenly puffed out behind that sailing bird, and presently a sharp
crack of a bursting shrapnel shell came down to our ears. Another puff
of smoke, closer, one in front, above, below. They chased round him
like swallows. In all the drab hideousness of modern warfare there is
nothing so airy, so piquant, so pretty as this.

Our bird and his pursuers disappeared in the north; over the level
country to the south floated a German observation balloon, and presently
we rumbled over a canal and through the shattered village of La Bassee.
La Bassee had been in the war despatches for months, and looked it. Its
church, used as a range-finder, apparently, was a gray honeycomb from
which each day a few shells took another bite. Roofs were torn off,
streets strewn with broken glass and brick; yet it is in such houses and
their cellars that soldiers fighting in the trenches in a neighborhood
like this come back for a rest, dismal little islands which mask the
armies one does not see at the front.

The custom of billeting soldiers in houses--possible in territory so
closely built up--adds to the vagueness of modern warf