ine
is fully revealed, even to such details as the barbed wire in front and
the approaches in rear.

For clues to battery positions and the like, the gun country behind the
frontier of the trenches is likewise searched by camera. One day a
certain square on the artillery map seems lifeless. The following
afternoon an overhead snapshot reveals a new clump of trees or a curious
mark not to be found on earlier photographs. On the third day the mark
has disappeared, or the trees are clustered in a slightly different
shape. But meanwhile an exact position has been pin-pointed, so that
certain heavy guns busy themselves with concentrated fire. By the fourth
day the new gun-pits, or whatever it was that the Hun tried to smuggle
into place unnoticed, have been demolished and is replaced by a wide
rash of shell-holes.

Wonderful indeed is the record of war as preserved by prints in the
archives of our photographic section. For example, we were shown last
week a pair of striking snapshots taken above Martinpuich, before and
after bombardment. The Before one pictured a neat little village in
compact perspective of squares, rectangles, and triangles. The Aftermath
pictured a tangled heap of sprawling chaos, as little like a village as
is the usual popular novel like literature.

Of all the Flying Corps photographs of war, perhaps the most striking is
that taken before Ypres of the first Hun gas attack. A B.E2.C., well
behind the German lines, caught sight of a strange snowball of a cloud
rolling across open ground, in the wake of an east wind. It flew to
investigate, and the pilot photographed the phenomenon from the rear.
This reproduction of a tenuous mass blown along the discoloured earth
will show coming generations how the Boche introduced to the black art
of warfare its most devilish form of frightfulness.

I would send you a few aerial photographs, as you suggest, if the
private possession of them were not strictly verboten. Possibly you will
have an opportunity of seeing all you want later, for if the authorities
concerned are wise they will form a public collection of a few thousand
representative snapshots, to show the worlds of to-day, to-morrow, and
the day after what the camera did in the great war. Such a permanent
record would be of great value to the military historian; and on a rainy
afternoon, when the more vapid of the revues were not offering matinees,
they might even be of interest to the average Londoner.