procession of ambulance cars drove along the quay and unloaded their stretcher cases. The Red Cross vessel churned slowly out of the harbor, and we followed at a respectful distance.

Passengers on a Channel leave-boat are quieter than might be expected. With the country of war behind them they have attained the third degree of content, and so novel is this state after months of living on edge that the short crossing does not allow sufficient time for them to be moved to exuberance. One promenades the crowded deck happily, taking care not to tread on the staff spurs, and talks of fighting as if it were a thing of the half-forgotten past. In a wellknown illustrated weekly a recent frontispiece, supposedly drawn "from material supplied," depicts a band of beaming Tommies, with weird water bottles, haversacks, mess-tins, and whatnots dangling from their sheepskin coats, throwing caps and cheers high into the air as they greet the cliffs of England. As the subject of an Academy picture, or an illustration for "The Hero's Home-coming, or How a Bigamist Made Good," the sketch would be excellent. But, except for the beaming faces, it is fanciful. A shadowy view of the English coastline draws a crowd to the starboard side of the boat, whence one gazes long and joyfully at the dainty cliffs. Yet there is no outward sign of excitement; the deep satisfaction felt by all is of too intimate a nature to call for cheering and cap-throwing. The starboard deck remains crowded as the shore looms larger and until, on entry into Dovstone harbor, one prepares for disembarkation.

The front seemed very remote from the train that carried us from Dovstone to London. How could one think of the wilderness with the bright hopfields of Kent chasing past the windows. Then came the mass-meeting of brick

houses that skirt London, and finally the tunnel which is the approach to the terminus. As the wheels rumbled through the darkness of it they suggested some lines of stray verse beginning

Twenty to eleven by all the clocks of Piccadilly;

Buy your love a lily-bloom, buy your love a rose.

It had been raining, and the faint yet unmistakable tang sniffed from wet London streets made one feel at home more than anything else. We dispersed, each to make his interval of heaven according to taste, means, and circumstances. That same evening I

was fortunate in being helped to forget the realities of war by two experiences. A much-mustached A.P.M. threatened me with divers penalties for the wearing of a soft hat; and I was invited to a merry gathering of theatrical luminaries, enormously interested in themselves and enormously bored by the war, which usurped so much newspaper space that belonged by rights to the lighter drama.

Curtain and interval of ten days, at the end of which I was offered a place as passenger in a machine destined for my own squadron. The bus was to be taken to an aircraft depôt in France from Rafborough Aerodrome. Rafborough is a small town galvanized into importance by its association with flying. Years ago, in the far-away days when aviation itself was matter for wonder, the pioneers who concerned themselves with the possibilities of war flying made their headquarters at Rafborough. An experimental factory, rich in theory, was established, and near it was laid out an aerodrome for the more practical work. Thousands of machines have since been tested on the rough-grassed aerodrome, while the neighboring Royal Aircraft Fac

tory has continued to produce designs, ideas, aeroplanes, engines, and aircraft accessories. Formerly most types of new machines were put through their official paces at Rafborough, and most types, including some captures from the Huns, were to be seen in its sheds. Probably Rafborough has harbored a larger variety of aircraft and aircraft experts than any other place in the world.

My friend the ferry-pilot having announced that the carriage waited, I strapped our baggage, some new gramophone records, and myself into the observer's office. I also tooktell this not in Gath, for the transport of dogs by aeroplane has lately been forbidden-a terrier pup sent to a fellow-officer by his family. At first the puppy was on a cord attached to some cross bracing wires; but as he showed fright when the machine took off from the ground, I kept him on my lap for a time. Here he remained subdued and apparently uninterested. Later, after becoming inured to the engine's drone and the slight vibration, he roused himself and wanted to explore the narrowing passage toward the tail-end of the fuselage. The little chap was, however, distinctly pleased to be on land again at Saint Gregoire, where he kept well away from the machine, as if uncertain whether the strange giant of an animal were friendly or a dog-eater.

It was a morning lovely enough to be that of the world's birthday. Not a cloud flecked the sky, the flawless blue of which was made tenuous by the sunlight. The sun brightened the kaleidoscopic earthscape below us, so that rivers and canals looked like quicksilver threads, and even the railway lines glistened. The summer countryside, as viewed from an aeroplane, is to my mind the finest scene in the world-an unexampled scene, of which, I hope, poets will sing in the

coming days of universal flight. The varying browns and greens of the fieldpattern merge into one another delicately; the woods, splashes of bottlegreen, relieve the patchwork of hedge from too ordered a scheme; rivers and roads crisscross in riotous manner over the vast tapestry; pleasant villages and farm buildings snuggle in the valleys or straggle on the slopes. The wide and changing perspective is full of a harmony unspoiled by the jarring notes evident on solid ground. Ugliness and dirt are camouflaged by the clean top of everything. Grimy towns and jerry-built suburbs seem almost attractive when seen in mass from a height. Slums, the dead uniformity of long rows of houses, sordid backgardens, bourgeois public statuesall these eyesores are mercifully hidden by the roofed surface. The very factory chimneys have a certain air of impressiveness in common with church towers and the higher buildings. Once, on ying over the pottery town of Coalport the most uninviting place I have ever visited-I found that the altered perspective made it look delightful.

A westward course, with the fringe of London away on our left, brought us to the coast-line all too soon. Passing Dovstone, the bus continued across the Channel. A few ships, tiny and slow-moving when observed from a machine at 8000 feet and traveling 100 miles an hour, spotted the sea. A cluster of what were probably destroyers threw out trails of dark smoke. From above mid-Channel we could see plainly the two coaststhat of England knotted into small creeks and capes, that of France bent into large curves, except for the sharp corner at Grisnez. Behind was Blighty, with its greatness and its-sawdust. Ahead was the province of battle, with its good-fellowship and itsmud. I lifted the puppy to show him

his new country, but he merely exhibited boredom and a dislike of the sudden rush of air.

From Cape Grisnez we steered northeast towards Calais, so as to have a clearly defined course to the aircraft depôt of Saint Gregoire. After a cross-Channel flight one notes a marked difference between the French and British earthscapes. The French towns and villages seem to sprawl less than those of England, and the countryside in general is more compact and regular. The roads are straight and tree-bordered, so that they form almost as good a guide to the airman as the railways. In England the roads twist and twirl through each other like the threads of a spider's web, and failing rail or river or prominent landmarks, one usually steers by compass rather than trust to roads.

At Calais we turned to the right and followed a network of canals southwestward to Saint Gregoire, where was an aircraft depôt similar to the one at Rafborough. New machines call at Saint Gregoire before passing to the service aerodromes, and in its workshops machines damaged but repairable are made fit for further service. It is also a higher training center for airmen. Before they join a squadron pilots fresh from their instruction in England gain experience on service machines belonging to the "pool" at Saint Gregoire.

Having been told by telephone from my squadron that one of our pilots had been detailed to take the recently arrived bus to the Somme, I awaited his arrival and passed the time to good purpose in watching the aerobatics and sham fights of the pool pupils. Every now and then another plane from England would arrive high over the aerodrome, spiral down and land into the wind. The ferry-pilot who had brought me left for Rafborough almost immediately on a

much flown "quirk." The machine he had delivered at Saint Gregoire was handed over to a pilot from Umpty Squadron when the latter reported, and we took to the air soon after lunch. The puppy traveled by road over the last lap of his long journey, in the company of a lorry driver.

The

The bus headed east while climbing, for we had decided to follow the British lines as far as the Somme, a course which would be prolific in interesting sights, and which might provide that rare gift of the gods, an air flight over friendly territory. colored panorama below gave place gradually to a wilderness-ugly brown and pock-marked. The roads became bare and dented, the fields were mottled by shellholes, the woods looked like scraggy patches of burnt furze. It was a district of great deeds and glorious deaths-the desolation surrounding the fronts of yesterday and today.

North of Ypres we turned to the right and hovered a while over this city of ghosts. Seen from above the shell of the ancient city suggests a grim reflection on the mutability of beauty. I sought a comparison, and could think of nothing but the skeleton of a once charming woman. The ruins stood out in a magnificent disorder that was starkly impressive. Walls without roof, buildings with but two sides, churches without tower were everywhere prominent, as though proud to survive the orgy of destruction. The shattered Cathedral retained much of its former grandeur. Only the old Cloth Hall, half-razed and without arch or belfry, seemed to cry for vengeance on the vandalism that wrecked it. The gaping skeleton was gray-white, as if sprinkled by the powder of decay. And one fancies that at night-time the ghosts of 1915 mingle with the ghosts of Philip of

Spain's era of conquest and the ghosts of great days in other centuries, as they search the ruins for relics of the city they knew.

Left of us was the salient, studded with broken villages that became household names during the two epic Battles of Ypres. The brown soil was dirty, shell-ploughed, and altogether unlovely. Those strange markings, which from our height looked like the tortuous pathways of a serpent, were the trenches, old and new, front line, support, and communication. saps projected from the long lines at every angle. So complicated was the jumble that the sinister region of No Man's Land, with its shell holes, dead bodies, and barbed wire, was scarcely distinguishable.

Small

A brown strip enclosed the trenches, and wound northward and southward. Its surface had been torn and battered by innumerable shells. On its fringe, among the copses and crests, were the guns, though these were evidenced only by an occasional flash. Behind, in front, and around them were those links in the chain of war, the oft-cut telephone wires. The desolation seemed utterly bare, though one knew that over and under it, hidden from eyes in the air, swarmed the slaves of the gun, the rifle, and the bomb.

Following the belt of wilderness southward, we were obliged to veer to the right at St. Eloi, so as to round a sharp bend. Below the bend, and on the wrong side of it, was the Messines Ridge, the recent capture of which has straightened the line as far as Hooge, and flattened the Ypres salient out of existence as a salient. Next came the torn and desolate outline of Plug Street Wood, and with it reminiscences of a splendid struggle against odds when the 1915 shell shortage hampered the early armies. Armentières appeared still worthy to be

we passed down the line the brown band narrowed until it seemed a strip of discolored water-marked ribbon sewn over the mosaic of open country. The trench lines were monotonous in their sameness. The shell-spotted area bulged at places, as for example Festubert, Neuve Chapelle (of bitter memory), Givenchy, Hulluch, and Loos. Lens, well behind the German trenches in those days, showed few marks of bombardment. The ribbon of ugliness widened again between Souchez and the yet uncaptured Vimy Ridge, but afterwards contracted as far as Arras, that ragged sentinel of the war frontier.

At Arras we entered our Own particular province, which, after months of flying over it, I knew better than my native county. Gun flashes became numerous, kite balloons hung motionless, and we met restless aeroplane formations engaged on defensive patrols. With these latter on guard our chance of a scrap with roving enemy craft would have been remote; though for that matter neither we nor they saw a single black-crossed machine throughout the afternoon.

From Gommecourt to the Somme was an area of concentrated destruction. The wilderness swelled outwards, becoming twelve miles wide at parts. Tens of thousands of shells had pocked the dirty soil, scores of mine explosions had cratered it. Only the pen of a Zola could describe adequately the zone's intense desolation. Those ruins, suggestive of abandoned scrap-heaps, were formerly villages. They had been made familiar to the world through matter-of-fact reports of attack and counter attack, capture

and recapture. Each had a tale to tell of systematic bombardment, of crumbling walls, of wild hand-to-hand fighting, of sudden evacuation and occupation. Now they were nothing but useless piles of brick and glorious names-Thiepval, Pozières, La Boiselle, Guillemont, Flers, Hardecourt, Guinchy, Combles, Bouchavesnes, and a dozen others.

Of all the crumbled roads the most striking was the long, straight one joining Albert and Bapaume. It looked fairly regular for the most part, except where the trenches cut it. Beyond the scrap heap that once was Pozières two enormous quarries dipped into the earth on either side of the road. Until the Messines explosion they were the largest mine craters on the western front. Farther along the road was the scene of the first tank raids, where on September 16 the metal monsters waddled across to the gaping enemy and ate up his pet machine gun emplacements before he had time to recover from his surprise. At the road's end was the forlorn stronghold of Bapaume. One by one the lines of defense before it had been stormed, and it was obvious that the town must fall, though its capture was delayed until months later by a fierce defense at the Butte de Warlencourt and elsewhere. The advance towards Bapaume was of special interest to R.F.C. squadrons on the Somme, for the town had been a troublesome center of anti aircraft devilries. Our field guns now being too close for Herr Archie, he had moved to more comfortable headquarters.

Some eight miles east of Bapaume the Bois d'Havrincourt stood out noticeably by reason of its curious shape, which was that of an enormous Ace of Spades. Around Old Mossy Face, as the wood was then known in R.F.C. messes, were clustered many Boche aerodromes. Innumerable duels

had been fought in the air country between Mossy Face and the lines. Every fine day the dwellers in the trenches before Bapaume saw machines swerving round each other in determined effort to destroy. This region was the hunting ground of many dead notabilities of the air, including the Fokker stars Boelcke and Immelmann, besides British pilots as brilliant but less advertised.

Below the Pozières-Bapaume road were five small woods, grouped like the Great Bear constellation of stars. Their roots were feeding on hundreds of dead bodies, after each of the five -Trones, Mametz, Foureaux, Delville, and Bouleaux-had seen wild encounters with bomb and bayonet beneath its dead trees. Almost in the same position relative to the cluster of woods as is the North Star to the Great Bear, was a scrap heap larger than most, amid a few walls yet upright. This was all that remained of the fortress of Combles. For two years the enemy strengthened it by every means known to military science, after which the British and French rushed in from opposite sides and met in the main street.

A few minutes down the line brought our machine to the sparkling Somme, the white town of Péronne, and the then junction of the British and French lines. We turned northwest and made for home. Passing over some lazy sausage balloons, we reached Albert. Freed at last from the intermittent shelling from which it suffered for so long, the town was picking up the threads of activity. The sidings were full of trucks, and a procession of some twenty lorries moved slowly up the road to Bouzincourt. As reminder of anxious days, we noted a few skeleton roofs, and the giant Virgin Mary in tarnished gilt, who, after withstanding bombardments sufficient to have wrecked a cathedral,