the
wind, started for the Rhine. And the day before the great attack the
British aviation corps sprang a surprise on the German sausages, six of
which disappeared in balls of flame.

A one-armed man of middle age from India, who offered to do his "bit,"
refused a post at home in keeping with his physical limitations. His
eyes were all right, he said, when he nominated himself as a balloon
observer, and he never suffered from sea-sickness which sausage balloons
most wickedly induce. Many a man who has ascended in one not only could
see nothing, but wanted to see nothing, and turning spinach lopping over
the basket rail prayed only that the engine would begin drawing in
immediately.

One day the one-armed pilot was up with a "joy-rider"; that is, an
officer who was not a regular aerial observer but was sight-seeing. The
balloon suddenly broke loose with the wind blowing strong toward Berlin,
which was a bit awkward, as he remarked, considering that he had an
inexperienced passenger.

"We mustn't let the Boches get us!" he said. "Look sharp and do as I
say."

First, he got the joy-rider into the parachute harness for such
emergencies and over the side, then himself, both descending safely on
the right side of the British trenches--which was rather "smart work,"
as the British would say, but all to the taste of the one-armed pilot
who was looking for adventures. I have counted thirty-three British
sausage balloons within my range of vision from a hill. The previous
year the British had not a baker's dozen.

What is lacking? Have we enough of everything? These questions were
haunting to organizers in those last days of preparation.

After dark the scene from a hill, as you rode toward the horizon of
flashes, was one of incredible grandeur. Behind you, as you looked
toward the German lines, was the blanket of night pierced and slashed by
the flashes of gun blasts; overhead the bloodcurdling, hoarse sweep of
their projectiles; and beyond the darkness had been turned into a
chaotic, uncanny day by the jumping, leaping, spreading blaze of
explosives which made all objects on the landscape stand out in
flickering silhouette. Spurts of flame from the great shells rose out of
the bowels of the earth, softening with their glow the sharp,
concentrated, vicious snaps of light from shrapnel. Little flashes
played among big flashes and flashes laid over flashes shingle fashion
in a riot of lurid competition, while along the line