s and was turning in at the first of
the row of cottages. Another photograph was produced. It showed the
second man entering the gate of the fourth cottage. And the final
picture of the series showed the remaining speck plodding on alone
toward his home in the country.

"An officer of some importance is evidently making this house his
headquarters," remarked the commandant, indicating another tiny
rectangle. "If he wasn't of some importance he wouldn't have a
telephone."

"Good heavens!" I exclaimed. "You don't mean to tell me that you can
photograph a telephone-wire from a mile in the air?"

"Not quite," he admitted, "but sometimes, if the light happens to be
right, we can get photographs of its shadow."

And sure enough, stretching across the ploughed fields, I could see,
through the glass, a phantom line, intersected at regular intervals by
short and somewhat thicker lines. It was the shadow of a
field-telephone and its poles! And the airplane from which that
photograph was taken was so high that it must have looked like a mere
speck to one on the ground. There's war magic for you.

You will ask, of course, why the Germans don't maintain over the
Allied lines a similar system of aerial observation. They do--when the
Allies let them. But the Allies now have in commission on the Western
Front such an enormous number of aircraft--I think I have said
elsewhere the French alone probably have close to seven thousand
machines--and they have made such great improvements in their
anti-aircraft guns that to-day it is a comparatively rare thing to see
a German flier over territory held by the Allies. The moment that a
German flier takes the air, half a dozen Allied airmen rise to meet
and engage him, and, in the rare event of his being able to elude
them and get over the Allied lines, the "Archies," as the
anti-aircraft guns are called on the British front, get into noisy
action. (Their name, it is said, came from a London music-hall song
which was exceedingly popular at the beginning of the war. When the
shells from the German A. A. guns burst harmlessly around the British
airmen they would hum mockingly the concluding line of the song:
"Archibald, certainly not!") Unable to keep their fliers in the air,
the Germans are to all intents and purposes blind. They are unable to
regulate the fire of their artillery or to direct their infantry
attacks; they do not know what damage their shells are doing; and they
have no means