By day the sky out here is full of interest, for one cannot go anywhere near the lines without seeing that aerial activity which has become intense and fierce lately. Yesterday I saw a great flight of our aeroplanes over the dead town of Armentières. There were between twenty and thirty of them making their way over the German lines, and the enemy hated the sight of them. His anti-aircraft guns got to work savagely and bursts of black shrapnel filled the sky all about those steady wings, but did not bring them down. He hated other aircraft watching over his lines--a long line of kite-balloons, "clustered like grapes," as some one described them, in our side of the sky. They were as white as snow when the sun touched them, and made tempting targets for long-range guns. Some German gunners registered on one of them nearest to Armentières, and I saw a terrific burst of yellow smoke, so close to it that it seemed like a hit. But the smoke cleared, and the kite balloon stayed calmly on its wire, and there was no parachute demonstration by our observers in the basket. The drone of our aeroplanes and the reports of German anti-aircraft guns made the only noise in Armentières--that and the sound of two men's footsteps as I and another walked through the streets of that town which is dead.
It is a queer thing to walk through a big town out of which all life has gone, and queer to me especially in Armentières, because I knew it not long ago when there were many women and girls about its streets, and when one could take one's choice of tea-shops--though only eighteen hundred yards away from the German line--and get an excellent little dinner in more than one restaurant. One could have one's hair cut and a shampoo to the musical accompaniment of field-batteries outside the town, and buy most of the things a man wants in the simple life of war (except peace) in shops kept by brave Frenchwomen--women too brave and too rash because they lived within 1800 yards of the enemy's line as though it were eighteen miles. Armentières was a modern little manufacturing town for lace and thread, with neat red-brick houses kept by well-to-do people who liked good comfortable furniture, and put a piano into their front parlour and a little marble Venus and other knick-knacks of art on the drawing-room table as a proof of good taste above the mere sordid interest of money-making.