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nderful panorama unfolding itself out beneath me, I glanced at my camera and tested the socket. Yes, it was quite firm. "We are nearing the lines now," my companion shouted. "Can you see them on your right? That's the Belgium area. Our section, as you know, begins just before Ypres. Will this height suit you? Shall I follow the trenches directly overhead or a little to one side?" "Keep this side, I'll begin taking now." Kneeling up in my seat, I directed my camera downwards and started filming our lines and the German position stretching away in the distance. We were nearing Ypres, that shell-battered city of Flanders. White balls of smoke here and there were bursting among the ruins, showing that the Huns were still shelling it. What a frightful state the earth was in. For miles and miles around it had the appearance of a sieve, with hundreds of thousands of shell-holes, and like a beautiful green ribbon, winding away as far as the eye could see, was that wonderful yet terrible strip of ground between the lines, known as "No Man's Land." We were now running into a bank of white fleecy clouds, which enveloped us in its folds, blotting the whole earth from view. I held my handkerchief over the lens of the camera to keep the moisture from settling upon it. After a time several breaks appeared in the clouds beneath, and the earth looked wonderful. It seemed miles--many miles--away. Rivers looked like silver streaks, and houses mere specks upon the landscape. Here and there a puff of white smoke told of a bursting shell. But for that occasional, somewhat unpleasant reminder, I might have been thousands of miles away from the greatest war in history. Who could imagine anything more wonderful, more fantastic? I had dreamed of such things, I had read of them; I even remembered having read, years ago, some of the wonderful stories in _Grimm's Fairy Tales_. To my childish mind, they seemed very wonderful indeed. There were fairies, goblins, mysterious figures, castles which floated in the air, wonderful lands which shifted in a night, at the touch of a magic wand or the sound of a magic word. Things which fired my youthful imagination and set me longing to share in their adventures. But never in my wildest dreams did I think I should live to do the same thing, to go where I listed; to fly like a bird, high above the clouds. It was like an adventure in fairyland to take this weird and wonderful creation of men, called
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