er "canned music" to the men on the firing-line.
They ought to be very proud of Mrs. Winterbottom back in her own home
town.

The Belgian trenches are very much like those on other sectors of the
Western Front, except that they are made of sand-bags instead of
earth, are muddier and are nearer the enemy, being separated from the
German positions, for a considerable distance, only by the Yser, which
in places is only forty yards across. In fact, a baseball player could
easily sling a stone across the river into Dixmude, or what remains
of it, for, like most of the other Flemish towns, it is now only a
blackened skeleton. Many cities have been destroyed in the course of
this war, but none of them, unless it be Ypres, so nearly approaches
complete obliteration as Dixmude. Pompeii is a living, breathing city
compared to it. Despite all that has been printed about the
devastation in the war zone, I believe that when the war is over and
the hordes of curious Americans flock Europeward, they will be stunned
by the completeness of the desolation which the Germans have wrought
in northeastern France and Belgium.

By far the most interesting day I spent on the Belgian front was not
in the trenches but in a long, low, wooden building well to the rear.
Over the door was a sign which read: "Section Photographique de
l'Armee Belge." Here are brought to be developed and enlarged and
scrutinized the hundreds of photographs which are taken daily by
Belgian aviators flying over the German lines. In no department of
war work has there been greater progress during recent months than in
photography by airplane. Every morning at break of dawn scores of
Belgian machines--and the same is true all down the Western
Front--rise into the air, and for hour after hour swoop and circle
over the enemy's lines, taking countless photographs of his positions
by means of specially made cameras fitted with telescopic lenses. (The
Allied fliers on the Somme took seventeen hundred photographs during a
single day.) Most of these photographs are taken at a height of eight
thousand to ten thousand feet,[F] though very much lower, of course,
when an opportunity presents itself, and always with the camera as
nearly vertical as possible. As soon as an aviator has secured a
sufficient number of pictures of the locality or object which he has
been ordered to photograph, he wings his way back to his own lines,
the plates are immediately developed at the headquarter