There is no flustering the French population. That very day I heard of an old peasant, who asked a British soldier if he could not get permission for the old man to wear some kind of an armband which both sides would respect, so that he could cut his field of wheat between the trenches. Why not? Wasn’t it his wheat? Didn’t he need the crop?
The Germans fire into villages and towns; for the women and children there are the women and children of the enemy. But those in the German lines belong to the ally of England. Besides, they are women and children. So British gunners avoid the towns--which is, in one sense, a professional handicap.
The anti-aeroplane gun--Tricks of the trade--The vagabond of the army lines--Before the days of Archibald--Pie for the Taube-- “Swaggerest” of the gun tribe--Sport of war--Puffs in the blue--Difficulty of accuracy--“Sending the prying aerial eye home”--The business of planes.
There is another kind of gun, vagrant and free lance, which deserves a chapter by itself. It has the same bark as the eighteen-pounder field piece; the flight of the shell makes the same kind of sound. But its scream, instead of passing in a long parabola toward the German lines, goes up in the heavens toward something as large as your hand against the light blue of the summer sky--a German aeroplane.
At a height of seven or eight thousand feet the target seems almost stationary, when really it is going somewhere between fifty and ninety miles an hour. It has all the heavens to itself, and to the British it is a sinister, prying eye that wants to see if we are building any new trenches, if we are moving bodies of troops or of transport in some new direction, and where our batteries are in hiding. That aviator three miles above the earth has many waiting guns at his command. A few signals from his wireless and they would let loose on the target he indicated.
If the planes might fly as low as they pleased, they would know all that was going on in an enemy’s lines. They must keep up so high that through the aviator’s glasses a man on the road is the size of a pin-head. To descend low is as certain death as to put your head over the parapet of a trench when the enemy’s trench is only a hundred yards away. There are dead lines in the air, no less than on the earth.