nit could
possibly falter. Jeb knew this, and it made him feel all the more alone.

They reached a rise in the rolling landscape and stopped to breathe
their beasts which were shaking the heavy limbers by their desperate
gasps for air. The ground sloped down and up again, and there, protected
from the enemy, a new world came into view--a world wherein American,
French and English engineers, commanding an army of construction, worked
feverishly, as ants. For an instant the nobler Jeb prevailed, and he
raised his eyes in a mute prayer of thankfulness for this trio of
forces--the strongest combination the world has ever seen! The rumbling
cannon ceased to jar his nerves, while he gazed wistfully at the low
clouds sweeping by in companies that seemed to hasten from this theatre
of wrath. Occasional gusts of white smoke burst into being just beneath
them and hung a moment suspended before racing on; or a distant squirt
of lace-like shrapnel, curving ever downward, came to see what went on
behind the Allied lines.

Beyond these gusts and squirts of man-made clouds, observation
balloons--the "sausages" of the enemy--floated motionless above the
horizon, sometimes catching a fleck of sunlight and glistening like dull
silver. There were no German fliers in the air that day, but high above,
as gray vultures hungrily soaring over one spot, two American, two
British and four French airmen glided back and forth, in and out,
circling, circling. With such grace and ease did they pirouette through
their reconnaisance that Jeb was reminded of an aerial quadrille being
danced five thousand feet above the earth; or, seeming to tire of this,
one of them would change the play to hide-and-seek, point toward the
translucent blue and scoot behind a cloud, with the others following. It
was a cordial invitation for the Boche to come up and fight! Jeb did not
see them again for several minutes, but he noticed that one of the kite
balloons suddenly burst into a little puff of flame and disappeared.
Unconsciously, he grinned.

"_Sacre bleu!_" the _poilu_ cried delightedly. "More honor to our
'75's'!"

"I thought the planes did it!" Jeb turned in surprise.

"Oh, no, Monsieur! That was done by one of our guns six miles away!"

Below the pirouetting airmen there was no poetry of motion. Here men
strained and panted and wiped grimy sweat from their eyes. A month ago
this ground ahead had been vigorously contested--the very spot on which
Jeb now