Somebody wanted to walk on to the desolate village which raised its smashed walls a few hundred yards down the road.  The tall young officer said that this might not be done—­it would draw the enemy’s fire, and as if to accent this advice there was a sudden Bang! and the corner of one of the houses we were looking at collapsed in a cloud of dust.

Under these wailing parabolas, swinging invisibly across from horizon to horizon, we withdrew behind the farmhouse for lunch—­sandwiches, frankfurters kept hot in a fireless cooker, and red wine—­when far overhead a double-decker English aeroplane suddenly sailed over us.  It seemed to be about six thousand feet above us, so high that the sound of its motors was lost, and its speed seemed but a lazy, level drifting across the blue.  Did it take those three motor-cars and those little dots for some reconnoitring division commander and his staff?  Aeroplanes not only drop bombs, but signal to their friends; there was an uncomfortable amount of artillery scattered about the country, and we watched with peculiar interest the movements of this tiny hawk.

But already other guns, as hidden as those that might be threatening us, had come, as it were, to the rescue.  A little ball of black smoke suddenly puffed out behind that sailing bird, and presently a sharp crack of a bursting shrapnel shell came down to our ears.  Another puff of smoke, closer, one in front, above, below.  They chased round him like swallows.  In all the drab hideousness of modern warfare there is nothing so airy, so piquant, so pretty as this.

Our bird and his pursuers disappeared in the north; over the level country to the south floated a German observation balloon, and presently we rumbled over a canal and through the shattered village of La Bassee.  La Bassee had been in the war despatches for months, and looked it.  Its church, used as a range-finder, apparently, was a gray honeycomb from which each day a few shells took another bite.  Roofs were torn off, streets strewn with broken glass and brick; yet it is in such houses and their cellars that soldiers fighting in the trenches in a neighborhood like this come back for a rest, dismal little islands which mask the armies one does not see at the front.

The custom of billeting soldiers in houses—­possible in territory so closely built up—­adds to the vagueness of modern warfare.  Americans associate armies with tents.  When we mobilized ten thousand men at San Antonio, you were in a city of soldiers.  Ten thousand men in this war disappear like water in sand.  Some of them are in the trenches, some in villages like this, out of the zone of heavier fire, but within a few minutes’ walk of their work, so to speak.  Others are distributed farther back, over a zone perhaps ten miles deep, crisscrossed with telephone-wires, and so arranged with assembling stations, reserves, and sub-reserves that the whole is a closely knit organism all the way up to the front.  There is continual movement in this body—­the men in the trenches go back after forty-eight hours to the near-by village, after days or weeks of this service, back clear out of the zone of fire; fresh men come up to take their places, and so on.  All you see as you whirl through is a sentry here, a soldier’s head there at a second-story window, a company shuffling along a country road.