Better than ever before I realized the idiocy of sending men to fight in garments that make vivid targets of them.

My companion may have come up for pleasure, but if business obtruded itself on him he did not neglect it.  He bent to his telephone and spoke briskly into it.  He used German, but, after a fashion, I made out what he said.  He was directing the attention of somebody to the activities of those red trousers.

I intended to see what would follow on this, but at this precise moment a sufficiently interesting occurrence came to pass at a place within much clearer eye range.  The gray grub-worms had shoved ahead until they were gray ants; and now all the ants concentrated into a swarm and, leaving the trenches, began to move in a slanting direction toward a patch of woods far over to our left.  Some of them, I think, got there, some of them did not.  Certain puff-balls of white smoke, and one big smudge of black smoke, which last signified a bomb of high explosives, broke over them and among them, hiding all from sight for a space of seconds.  Dust clouds succeeded the smoke; then the dust lifted slowly.  Those ants were not to be seen.  They had altogether vanished.  It was as though an anteater had come forth invisibly and eaten them all up.

Marveling at this phenomenon and unable to convince myself that I had seen men destroyed, and not insects, I turned my head south again to watch the red ladybugs in the field.  Lo!  They were gone too!  Either they had reached shelter or a painful thing had befallen them.

The telephone spoke a brisk warning.  I think it made a clicking sound.  I am sure it did not ring; but in any event it called attention to itself.  The other man clapped his ear to the receiver and took heed to the word that came up the dangling wire, and snapped back an answer.

“I think we should return at once,” he said to me over his shoulder.  “Are you sufficiently wearied?”

I was not sufficiently wearied—­I wasn’t wearied at all—­but he was the captain of the ship and I was not even paying for my passage.

The car jerked beneath our unsteady feet and heeled over, and I had the sensation of being in an elevator that has started downward suddenly, and at an angle to boot.  The balloon resisted the pressure from below.  It curled up its tail like a fat bumblebee trying to sting itself, and the guy ropes, to which I held with both hands, snapped in imitation of the rigging of a sailboat in a fair breeze.  Plainly the balloon wished to remain where it was or go farther; but the pull of the cable was steady and hard, and the world began to rise up to meet us.  Nearing the earth it struck me that we were making a remarkably speedy return.  I craned my neck to get a view of what was directly beneath.

The six-horse team was advancing toward us at a brisk canter and the drum turned fast, taking up the slack of the tether; but, as though not satisfied with this rate of progress, several soldiers were running back and jumping up to haul in the rope.  The sergeant who took care of the telephone was hard put to it to coil down the twin wires.  He skittered about over the grass with the liveliness of a cricket.