The score of the contest of battle is in men down; in killed and wounded. For every man down on your side you want two men down on the enemy’s. Sport ceases. It is the fight between a burglar with a revolver in his hand and a knife between his teeth; and a wounded man brought along the trench, a visible, intimate proof of a hit by the enemy, calls for more and harder blows.
Looking over the parapet of the communication trench you saw fields, lifeless except for the singing birds in the wheat, who had also the spirit of battle. The more shells, the more they warble. It was always so on summer days. Between the screams you heard their full-pitched chorus, striving to make itself heard in competition with the song of German invasion and British resistance. Mostly, the birds seemed to take cover like mankind; but I saw one sweep up from the golden sea of ripening grain toward the men-brothers with their wings of cloth.
Was this real, or was it extravaganza? Painted airships and a painted summer sky? The audacity of those British airmen! Two of them were spotting the work of British guns by their shell-bursts and watching for gun-flashes which would reveal concealed German battery positions, and whispering results by wireless to their own batteries.
It is a great game. Seven or eight thousand feet high, directly over the British planes, is a single Taube cruising for the same purpose. It looks like a beetle with gossamer wings suspended from a light cloud. The British aviators are so low that the bull’s-eye identification marks are distinctly visible to the naked eye. They are playing in and out, like the short stop and second baseman around second, there in the very arc of the passing shells from both sides fired at other targets. But scores of other shells are most decidedly meant for them. In the midst of a lace-work of puffs of shrapnel bursts, which slowly spread in the still air, from the German anti-aircraft guns, they dip and rise and turn in skilful dodging. At length, one retires for good; probably his planecloth has become too much like a sieve from shrapnel fragments to remain aloft longer.
Come down, Herr Taube, come down where we can have a shot at you! Get in the game! You can see better at the altitude of the British airmen! But Herr Taube always stays high--the Br’er Fox of the air. Of course, it was not so exciting as the pictures that artists draw, but it was real.