as become so much a necessity to the army that it is
difficult to imagine how wars were ever fought without them. I
remember reading a statement by a military observer with the Japanese
army that, if the Russians had had a single aeroplane, they could have
annihilated the Japs more than once. Of the army's pair of eyes the
airman is the sharper, but the old-time scout is not by any means
superseded, though his methods have changed. Just as there is much
behind the enemy lines that only the aeroplanes can see, there are some
things that cannot be discovered except from the level of the ground
along which the scout crawls. The airman makes the enemy's plans an
open book, for he observes him as soon as he moves, but the airman
travels on a different plane from the infantry soldier, and it is the
infantry man who fights out the final phase of the battle. The ground
has an altogether different aspect from the air, and aeroplane
photographs sometimes mislead. The scout, however, goes ahead on the
same ground that the infantry have to travel, and he can bring back
news of exactly what is there. The airmen do not help us much in
determining the condition of the enemy's barbed wire, and nothing is so
fatal for an attack as being held up on the wire. "Streamer" wire
cannot be seen a few yards away, and only by sending out advance
scouting-parties can a commander know whether the wire has been
sufficiently destroyed to allow an easy passage for his troops. As an
attack is always planned to take two or three of the enemy's lines,
these scouts have to find out the condition of the wire in front of the
second or third line trenches as well.

Crawling in No Man's Land and behind the German lines is not as
dangerous as it sounds. The greatest cause of casualties is shell-fire
and the scout is safe from this, for, naturally, no enemy shells fall
near him in enemy territory, and he has previously arranged with his
own artillery to withhold fire from the sector in which he is working.
He runs little risk even from machine-guns or rifles, for the ground is
so honeycombed with shell-holes that he is nearly all the time in good
cover. The only danger that he runs is that of discovery, and for a
properly trained scout such is inexcusable.

The general idea the stay-at-home has of the trenches is that every
yard contains a man who is watching out for signs of the enemy. But a
trench is serrated with bays containing half a dozen me