had come, as it were, to the rescue. A little ball of black smoke
suddenly puffed out behind that sailing bird, and presently a sharp
crack of a bursting shrapnel shell came down to our ears. Another puff
of smoke, closer, one in front, above, below. They chased round him
like swallows. In all the drab hideousness of modern warfare there is
nothing so airy, so piquant, so pretty as this.

Our bird and his pursuers disappeared in the north; over the level
country to the south floated a German observation balloon, and presently
we rumbled over a canal and through the shattered village of La Bassée.
La Bassée had been in the war despatches for months, and looked it. Its
church, used as a range-finder, apparently, was a gray honeycomb from
which each day a few shells took another bite. Roofs were torn off,
streets strewn with broken glass and brick; yet it is in such houses and
their cellars that soldiers fighting in the trenches in a neighborhood
like this come back for a rest, dismal little islands which mask the
armies one does not see at the front.

The custom of billeting soldiers in houses--possible in territory so
closely built up--adds to the vagueness of modern warfare. Americans
associate armies with tents. When we mobilized ten thousand men at San
Antonio, you were in a city of soldiers. Ten thousand men in this war
disappear like water in sand. Some of them are in the trenches, some in
villages like this, out of the zone of heavier fire, but within a few
minutes' walk of their work, so to speak. Others are distributed
farther back, over a zone perhaps ten miles deep, crisscrossed with
telephone-wires, and so arranged with assembling stations, reserves, and
sub-reserves that the whole is a closely knit organism all the way up to
the front. There is continual movement in this body--the men in the
trenches go back after forty-eight hours to the near-by village, after