ently drowsing over his own stretch of country. But they are
anything but drowsy. Each one contains his own quick eyes, keen brain,
his telescope, his telephone, and heaven knows what instruments. And out
on every beautiful fresh morning of spring come the butterflies of
modern warfare--two or three of our own planes, low down; and then a
white insect very, very high--now hidden behind a cloud, now appearing
again across the rift. It is delightful to stand there and watch it all
like a play. The bombs, if they drop 'em, are worth risking any day.

But it isn't the bombs that matter, and it isn't _you_ who run the risk.
The observer is not there to drop bombs, in most cases, but to watch,
watch, watch. A motor standing by the roadside, a body of men about some
work, extra traffic along a road--and a red tick goes down on a map;
that is all. You go away. But next day, or sometimes much sooner, that
red tick comes up for shelling as part of the normal day's routine of
some German battery.

So if these letters from France ever seem thin, remember that the war
correspondent does not wish to give to the enemy for a penny what he
would gladly give a regiment to get. On our way back is a field
pock-marked by a hundred ancient shell-holes around a few deserted
earthworks. On some bygone afternoon it must have been wild, raging,
reeking hell there for half an hour or so. Somebody in this landscape
put a red tick once against that long-forgotten corner.

CHAPTER IV

THE ROAD TO LILLE

_France, April._

There is a house at a certain corner I passed of late. On it, in big
white letters on a blue ground, is written "To Lille." Every township
for a hundred miles has that same signpost, showing you the way to the
great city of Northern France. But Rockefeller himself with all his
motor-cars could not follow its direction to-day. For the city to which
it points is six miles behind the German lines. You can get from our
lines the edge of some outlying suburb overlapping a distant hill-top.

And that is all that the French people can see of the second city of
their State. The distant roofs, the smoke rising from some great centre
of human activity nestled in a depression into which you cannot look;
you can peer at them all day long through a telescope and wonder why it
is they are stoking their chimneys, or what it is that causes the haze
to hang deeply on such and such a day over this or that corner--you can
study the pla