lively and good humored...." Next day he gives some details of his
billet, and adds: "I have had a _mitrailleuse_ support mounted on my
machine, and now I am ready for the hunt.... Yesterday at five o'clock I
darted around above the house at 1700 or 2000 meters. Did you see me? I
forced my motor for five minutes in hopes that you would hear me." He
had recently parted from his family, and a happy chance had brought him
to fight over the very lines that protected his own home. The front of
the Sixth Army to which he was attached, extending from Ribécourt beyond
the forest of Laigue, passed in front of Railly and Tracy-le-Val,
hollowed itself before the enemy salient of Moulin-sous-Touvent,
straightened itself again near Autrèches and Nouvron-Vingré, covered
Soissons, whose very outskirts were menaced, was obliged to turn back on
the left bank of the Aisne where the enemy took, in January, 1915, the
bridge-head at Condé, and Vailly and Chavonne, and crossed the river
again at Soupir which belonged to us. Laon, La Fère, Coucy-le-Château,
Chauny, Noyon, Ham, and Péronne were the objects of his reconnoitering
flights.

War acts more poignantly, more directly upon a soldier whose own home is
immediately behind him. If the front were pierced in the sector which
had been intrusted to him, his own people would be exposed. So he
becomes their sentinel. Under such conditions, _la Patrie_ is no longer
merely the historic soil of the French people, the sacred ground every
parcel of which is responsible for all the rest, but also the beloved
home of infancy, the home of parents, and, for this collegian of
yesterday, the scene of charming walks and delightful vacations. He has
but just now left the paternal mansion; and, not yet accustomed to the
separation, he visits it by the roads of the air, the only ones which he
is now free to travel. He does not take advantage of his proximity to
Compiègne to go ring the familiar door-bell, because he is a soldier and