In a corner of the turnip field close up to the road were mounds of fresh-turned clay, and so many of them were there and so closely were they spaced and for so considerable a distance did they stretch along, they made two long yellow ribs above the herbage.  At close intervals small wooden crosses were stuck up in the rounded combs of earth so that the crosses formed a sort of irregular fence.  A squad of soldiers were digging more holes in the tough earth.  Their shovel blades flashed in the sunlight and the clods flew up in showers.

“We have many buried over there,” said an artillery captain, seeing that I watched the grave diggers, “a general among them and other officers.  It is there we bury those who die in the Institute hospital.  Every day more die, and so each morning trenches are made ready for those who will die during that day.  A good friend of mine is over there; he was buried day before yesterday.  I sat up late last night writing to his wife—­or perhaps I should say his widow.  They had been married only a few weeks when the call came.  It will be very hard on her.”

He did not name the general who lay over yonder, nor did we ask him the name.  To ask would not have been etiquette, and for him to answer would have been worse.  Rarely in our wanderings did we find a German soldier of whatsoever rank who referred to his superior officer by name.  He merely said “My captain” or “Our colonel.”  And this was of a piece with the plan—­not entirely confined to the Germans—­of making a secret of losses of commanders and movements of commands.

We went thence then, the distance being perhaps three miles by road and not above eight minutes by automobile at the rate we traveled to an aviation camp at the back side of the town.  Here was very much to see, including many aeroplanes of sorts domiciled under canvas hangars and a cheerful, chatty, hospitable group of the most famous aviators in the German army—­lean, keen young men all of them—­and a sample specimen of the radish-shaped bomb which these gentlemen carry aloft with the intent of dropping it upon their enemies when occasion shall offer.  Each of us in turn solemnly hefted the bomb to feel its weight.  I should guess it weighed thirty pounds—­say, ten pounds for the case and twenty pounds for its load of fearsome ingredients.  Finally, yet foremost, we were invited to inspect that thing which is the pride and the brag of this particular arm of the German Army—­a balloon-cannon, so called.

The balloon-gun of this size is—­or was at the date when I saw it—­an exclusively German institution.  I believe the Allies have balloon-guns too, but theirs are smaller, according to what the Germans say.  This one was mounted on a squatty half-turret at the tail end of an armored-steel truck.  It had a mechanism as daintily adjusted as a lady’s watch and much more accurate, and when being towed by its attendant automobile, which has harnessed within it the power of a hundred and odd draft horses, it has been known to cover sixty English miles in an hour, for all that its weight is that of very many loaded vans.