It is an exciting life a balloon operator in the German Army lives, but it is not, as a rule, a long one.  Lieutenant Meiningen was successor to a man who was burned to death in mid-air a week before; and on the day before a French airman had dropped a bomb from the clouds that missed this same balloon by a margin of less than a hundred yards—­close marksmanship, considering that the airman in question was seven or eight thousand feet aloft, and moving at the rate of a mile or so a minute when he made his cast.

It was the Lieutenant who said he had authority to take one of our number up with him, and it was I who chanced to be nearest to the balloon when he extended the invitation.  Some one—­a friend—­removed from between my teeth the unlighted cigar I held there, for fear I might forget and try to light it; and somebody else—­a stranger to me—­ suggested that perhaps I was too heavy for a passenger.

By that time, however, a kindly corporal had boosted me up over the rim of the basket and helped me to squeeze through the thick netting of guy lines; and there I was, standing inside that overgrown clotheshamper, which came up breast high on me—­and Brinkner und Meiningen was swinging himself nimbly in beside me.  That basket was meant to hold but one man.  It made a wondrously snug fit for two; the both of us being full-sized adults at that.  We stood back to back; and to address the other each must needs speak over his shoulder.  The canvas saddle was between us, dangling against the calves of our legs; and the telephone was in front of the lieutenant, where he could reach the transmitter with his lips by stooping a little.

The soldiers began unhooking the sandbags; the sergeant who guarded the telephone wire took up a strand of it and held it loosely in his hands, ready to pay it out.  Under me I felt the basket heave gently.  Looking up I saw that the balloon was no longer a crooked sausage.  She had become a big, soft, yellow summer squash, with an attenuated neck.  The flaccid abdomen flinched in and puffed out, and the snout wabbled to and fro.

The lieutenant began telling me things in badly broken but painstaking English—­such things, for example, as that the baglike protuberance just above our heads, at the bottom end of the envelope, contained air, which, being heavier than gas, served as a balance to hold her head up in the wind and keep her from folding in on herself; also, that it was his duty to remain aloft, at the end of his tether, as long as he could, meantime studying the effect of the German shell-fire on the enemy’s position and telephoning down instructions for the better aiming of the guns—­a job wherein the aeroplane scouts ably reenforced him, since they could range at will, whereas his position was comparatively fixed and stationary.