nghold was at the
time notorious, fired a hundred rounds into the town square from a
height of 800 feet, and raced back over the Bapaume-Pozieres road
pursued by flaming "onion" rockets. The observer recovered from his
surprise in time to loose off a drum of ammunition at Bapaume, and three
more along the straight road to the front line, paying special attention
to the village of Le Sars.

It was above this village that I once was guilty of communicating with
the enemy. During a three-hours' offensive patrol around the
triangle--Bapaume-Mossy-Face Wood-Epehy--we had not seen a single Hun
machine. Low clouds held Archie in check, and there was therefore small
necessity to swerve from a straight course. Becoming bored, I looked at
the pleasant-seeming countryside below, and reflected how ill its
appearance harmonised with its merits as a dwelling-place, judged on the
best possible evidence--the half-hysterical diaries found on enemy
prisoners, the bitter outpourings anent the misery of intense
bombardment and slaughter, the ominous title "The Grave" given to the
region by Germans who had fought there. An echo of light-hearted
incursions into German literature when I was a student at a Boche
college suggested that the opening lines of Schiller's "Sehnsucht" were
peculiarly apposite to the state of mind of the Huns who dwelt by the
Somme. Wishing to share my discovery, I wrote the verse in large block
capitals, ready to be dropped at a convenient spot. I took the liberty
of transposing three pronouns from the first person to the second, so as
to apostrophise our Boche brethren. The patrol finished, my pilot
spiralled down to within a 300-yard range of the ground and flew along
the road past Martinpuich, while I pumped lead at anything that might be
a communication trench. We sprinkled Le Sars with bullets, and there I
threw overboard the quotation from a great German poet, folded inside an
empty Very's cartridge to which I had attached canvas streamers. If it
was picked up, I trust the following lines were not regarded merely as
wordy frightfulness:

"Ach! aus dieses Thales Gruenden
Die der kalte Nebel drueckt,
Koennt' ihr doch den Ausgang finden,
Ach! wie fuehlt' ihr euch beglueekt!"

Of all the tabloid tales published last year in R.P.C. 'Comic Cuts,' the
most comic was that of a mist, a British bus, and a Boche General. The
mist was troublesome; the bus, homeward bound after a reconnaissance,
was fly