al kind. Our _avions_ have
received many scars from their shells. Between forty-five hundred and
five thousand metres, their bursts have been so close under us that we
have been lifted by the concussions and set down violently again at
the bottom of the vacuum; and this on a clear day when a _chasse_
machine is almost invisible at that height, and despite its speed of
two hundred kilometres an hour. On a gray day, when we are flying
between twenty-five hundred and three thousand metres beneath a film
of cloud, they repay the honor we do them by our acrobatic turns. They
bracket us, put barrages between us and our own lines, give us more
trouble than all the other batteries on the sector combined.

For this reason it is all the more humiliating to be forced to land
with motor trouble, just at the moment when they are paying off some
old scores. This happened to Drew while I have been writing up my
journal. Coming out of a tonneau in answer to three _coups_ from the
battery, his propeller stopped dead. By planing flatly (the wind was
dead ahead, and the area back of the first lines there is a wide one,
crossed by many intersecting lines of trenches) he got well over them
and chose a field as level as a billiard table for landing-ground. In
the very center of it, however, there was one post, a small worm-eaten
thing, of the color of the dead grass around it. He hit it, just as he
was setting his Spad on the ground, the only post in a field acres
wide, and it tore a piece of fabric from one of his lower wings. No
doubt the crack battery has been given credit for disabling an enemy
plane. The honor, such as it is, belongs to our aerial godfather,
among whose lesser vices may be included that of practical joking.

The remnants of the post were immediately confiscated for firewood by
some _poilus_ who were living in a dugout near by.

IX

"LONELY AS A CLOUD"

The French attack which has been in preparation for the past month is
to begin at dawn to-morrow. It has been hard, waiting, but it must
have been a great deal worse for the infantrymen who are billeted in
all of the surrounding villages. They are moving up to-night to the
first lines, for these are the shock troops who are to lead the
attack. They are chiefly regiments of Chasseurs--small men in stature,
but clean, hard, well-knit--splendid types. They talk of the attack
confidently. It is an inspiration to l