Probably it took longer, but if you asked me I should say that not more than two or three minutes had passed before the earth stopped slipping away and we fetched up with a profound and disconcerting jerk.  The balloon had reached the tip of her hitch line.

She rocked and twisted and bent half double in the pangs of a fearful tummy-ache, and at every paroxysm the car lurched in sympathy, only to be brought up short by the pull of the taut cable; so that we two, wedged in together as we were, nevertheless jostled each other violently.  I am a poor sailor, both by instinct and training.  By rights and by precedents I should have been violently ill on the instant; but I did not have time to be ill.

My fellow traveler all this while was pointing out this thing and that to me—­showing how the telephone operated; how his field glasses poised just before his eyes, being swung and balanced on a delicately adjusted suspended pivot; telling me how on a perfectly clear day—­this October day was slightly hazy—­we could see the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and the Cathedral at Rheims; gyrating his hands to explain the manner in which the horses, trotting away from us as we climbed upward, had given to the drum on the wagon a reverse motion, so that the cable was payed out evenly and regularly.  But I am afraid I did not listen closely.  My eyes were so busy that my ears loafed on the job.

For once in my life—­and doubtlessly only once—­I saw now understandingly a battle front.

It was spread before me—­lines and dots and dashes on a big green and brown and yellow map.  Why, the whole thing was as plain as a chart.  I had a reserved seat for the biggest show on earth.

To be sure it was a gallery seat, for the terrace from which we started stood fully five hundred feet above the bottom of the valley, and we had ascended approximately seven hundred feet above that, giving us an altitude of, say, twelve hundred feet in all above the level of the river; but a gallery seat suited me.  It suited me perfectly.  The great plateau, stretching from the high hill behind us, to the river in front of us, portrayed itself, when viewed from aloft, as a shallow bowl, alternately grooved by small depressions and corrugated by small ridges.  Here and there were thin woodlands, looking exactly like scrubby clothesbrushes.  The fields were checkered squares and oblongs, and a ruined village in the distance seemed a jumbled handful of children’s gray and red blocks.

The German batteries appeared now to be directly beneath us—­some of them, though in reality I imagine the nearest one must have been nearly a mile away on a bee line.  They formed an irregular horseshoe, with the open end of it toward us.  There was a gap in the horseshoe where the calk should have been.  The German trenches, for the most part, lay inside the encircling lines of batteries.  In shape they rather suggested a U turned upside