same hats. I expect Fritz saw a good number of them in those days. Many
of the wearers of those hats had never seen an aeroplane before; much
less two aeroplanes, fighting a duel with machine-guns at close range,
10,000 feet over their heads, or being sniped at by a battery of hidden
15-pounder guns, every shot marking itself for the open-mouthed
spectators by its little white cotton-wool shell burst.

The German observer spent several hours jotting painful notes into a
well-thumbed pocket-book, staring in the intervals through his
telescope. Then the tree shook. Something ponderous from below felt its
way up the creaking ladder. A red face, like the face of the sun, peered
over the platform.

"Anything new, Fritz?" it puffed.

"Ja; those new troops we have noticed yesterday--I think they were
Australians."

So the observer sent it back to his officer, and his officer sent it
back to the brigade, and the brigade sent it on to the division. The
division was a little sceptical. "That crowd is always making these wild
discoveries," grunted the divisional Intelligence Officer, but he
thought it worth while passing it on to the Army Corps, who in their
turn sent it to the Army; and so, in due course, it arrived in those
awe-inspiring circles where lives the great German military brain.

"So that is where they have turned up," said a very big man with
spectacles--a big man in more ways than one. And a note went down in
red ink in a particular page of a huge index, to appear duly printed in
the next edition of that portentous volume. Only, after the note, there