d idea if you only have a small party to enter one of
these gaps, crawl down fifty yards inside the wire before attacking,
and, when finished, come out through another gap lower down, but every
man of the party needs to scout over the ground beforehand so there
will be no confusion during the attack. We have carried out successful
raids in this manner when none but the Germans who were attacked knew
anything of what was going on until we were back in our own trenches,
and rarely were there any of these who could give evidence except by
means of their dead bodies. I remember that one of our men, who was
champion wood-chopper of Australia before the war, drove his bayonet
through a German and six inches into a hardwood beam, and as he could
not withdraw it had to unship it, leaving the German stuck up there as
a souvenir of his visit. Probably not another man in the army could
have done it, but it no doubt added to the reputation of the
Australians, as these Fritzes must have thought us a race of Samsons.

There is a strong bond between us and the airmen, and the army's pair
of eyes are focussed together, for the information from both sources is
co-ordinated. Our trench maps are constructed chiefly from aeroplane
photographs, and it was only occasionally that some object would be
seen in the photograph that could not be identified; when we scouts
would have to crawl over to it and find out its family-tree.

All our intelligence officers are given schooling in aerial
observation, and I have been several times over the German lines with a
pilot, and have a very high admiration for these birdmen who are not
merely the bravest of the brave but princes of good fellows. I had
some wonderful aeroplane photographs of some of our attacks wherein I
could recognize the stages of our progress, and so expert has this work
become that a German soldier can hardly even brush away a fly without a
permanent record of it being obtained. Probably the greater number of
our aeroplanes on the battle-front are engaged in ranging for the
artillery, and in actual offensive warfare, but their greatest value is
in reconnoissance, and so it will always be.

"Airman" and "scout"--one flies, the other crawls, yet both seek
information from the enemy, and are the twin eyes of the army. There
is a romance about the work of both that attracts adventurous youth,
and neither is as dangerous as it appears to a layman. In the element
of the airman h