od everywhere, and underneath are the
everlasting arms!"

Sometimes the Sky Silhouettes number among their own just a moonlight
night with a crescent moon sailing quietly and serenely over the
horizon in the east, while great guns belch fire in the west, a fire
that seems to shame the timid moon itself.

Sometimes they are search-lights cleaving the sky over a great city
like Paris, or along the front lines, or gleaming from an air-ship.

Sometimes they are signal-lights flashing out of the darkness from a
patrolling plane overhead, or a blazing trail of fire as a patrol falls
to its death in a battle by night.

Sometimes they are signal-lights flashing from an observation balloon
anchored in the darkness over the trenches to guard the troops from
dangers in the air.

Sometimes they are the flashes, the fleet, swallow-like flashes, of an
enemy plane caught in the burning, blazing path of a search-light, and
then hounded by it to its death.

Sometimes they are signals flashed from the top of a cruiser on the
high seas across the storm-tossed waters to a little destroyer, which
flashes back its answer, and then in turn flashes a message of light to
one of the convoying planes overhead in the dim dusk of early evening.

Sometimes these Sky Silhouettes are the range-finders that poise in the
air for a few seconds, guiding the air patrols home, and sometimes they
are just the varied, interesting, gleaming, flashing "Lights of War."

XII

THE LIGHTS OF WAR

One's introduction into the war zone and into war-zone cities and
villages, and one's visits "down the line" to the front by night, will
always be filled with the thrill of the unusual because of the Lights
of War. Where lights used to be, there are no lights now, and where
they were not seen before the war, they are radiant and rampant now.

The first place that an American traveller notices this absence of
lights is on the boat crossing over the Atlantic. From the first night
out of New York the boats travel without a single light showing. Every
light inside of the boat is covered with a heavy black crape, and the
port-holes and windows are so scrupulously and carefully chained down
that the average open-air fiend from California or elsewhere feels that
he will suffocate before morning comes, and even in the bitterest of
winter weather I have known some fresh-air fiends to prefer the deck of
the ship, with all of its bitter winds and cold, to the in