Long before you get near the lines, away over the horizon before you,
there is floating what looks most like a flat white garden grub--small
because of its distance. Look to the south and to the north and you will
see at wide intervals others, one after the other until they fade into
the distance. Every fine day brings them out as regularly as the worms
rise after rain; they sit there all day long in the sky, each one
apparently drowsing over his own stretch of country. But they are
anything but drowsy. Each one contains his own quick eyes, keen brain,
his telescope, his telephone, and heaven knows what instruments. And out
on every beautiful fresh morning of spring come the butterflies of
modern warfare--two or three of our own planes, low down; and then a
white insect very, very high--now hidden behind a cloud, now appearing
again across the rift. It is delightful to stand there and watch it all
like a play. The bombs, if they drop 'em, are worth risking any day.

But it isn't the bombs that matter, and it isn't _you_ who run the risk.
The observer is not there to drop bombs, in most cases, but to watch,
watch, watch. A motor standing by the roadside, a body of men about some
work, extra traffic along a road--and a red tick goes down on a map;
that is all. You go away. But next day, or sometimes much sooner, that
red tick comes up for shelling as part of the normal day's routine of
some German battery.

So if these letters from France ever seem thin, remember that the war
correspondent does not wish to give to the enemy for a penny what he
would gladly give a regiment to get. On our way back is a field
pock-marked by a hundred ancient shell-holes around a few deserted
earthworks. On some bygone afternoon it must have been wild, raging,
reeking hell there for half an hour or so. Somebody in this landscape