all"--he turned to us with the air of apologizing somewhat for his
display of irritation--"it's quite annoying enough here without that,
you know."

It was, indeed, annoying--very. The trenches were not under fire in the
sense that the enemy were making a persistent effort to clear them out,
but they were in the zone of fire, their range was known, and there was
no telling, when that distant boom thudded across the fields, whether
that particular shell might be intended for them or for somebody's house
in town.

We could see in the distance their captive balloon, and there were a
couple of scouts, the officer said, in a tower in the village, not much
more than half a mile away. He pointed to the spot across the barbed
wire. "We've been trying to get them for the last half-hour."

We left them engaged in this interesting distraction, the little
rifle-snaps in all that mighty thundering seeming only to accent the
loneliness and helplessness of their position, and spun on down the
transverse road, toward another trench. The progress of the motor
seemed slow and disappointing. Not that the spot a quarter of a mile
off was at all less likely to be hit, yet one felt conscious of a
growing desire to be somewhere else. And, though I took off my hat to
keep it from blowing off, I found that every time a shell went over I
promptly put it on again, indicating, one suspected, a decline in what
the military experts call morale.

As we bowled down the road toward a group of brick houses on the left, a
shell passed not more than fifty yards in front of us and through the
side of one of these houses as easily as a circus rider pops through a