It looked like a good place for a concert, and so I quickly gathered an audience of about a thousand men from the dugouts in the embankment and obeyed their injunctions to “Go it, Harry!  Gie us a song, do now!”

As I finished my first song my audience applauded me and cheered me most heartily, and the laddies along the banks of the Scarpe heard them, and came running up to see what was afoot.  There were no ladies thereabout, and they did not stand on a small matter like getting dressed!  Not they!  They came running just as they were, and Adam, garbed in his fig leaf, was fully clad compared to most of them.  It was the barest gallery I ever saw, and the noisiest, too, and the most truly appreciative.

High up above us airplanes were circling, so high that we could not tell from which side they came, except when we saw some of them being shelled, and so knew that they belonged to Fritz.  They looked like black pinheads against the blue cushion of the sky, and no doubt that they were vastly puzzled as to the reason of this gathering of naked men.  What new tricks were the damned English up to now?  So I have no doubt, they were wondering!  It was the business of their observers, of course, to spot just such gatherings as ours, although I did not think of that just then—­except to think that they might drop a bomb or two, maybe.

But scouting airplanes, such as those were, do not go in for bomb dropping.  There are three sorts of airplanes.  First come the scouting planes—­fairly fast, good climbers, able to stay in the air a long time.  Their business is just to spy out the lay of the land over the enemy’s trenches—­not to fight or drop bombs.  Then come the swift, powerful bombing planes, which make raids, flying long distances to do so.  The Huns use such planes to bomb unprotected towns and kill women and babies; ours go in for bombing ammunition dumps and trains and railway stations and other places of military importance, although, by now, they may be indulging in reprisals for some of Fritz’s murderous raids, as so many folk at hame in Britain have prayed they would.

Both scouting and bombing planes are protected by the fastest flyers of all—­the battle planes, as they are called.  These fight other planes in the air, and it is the men who steer them and fight their guns who perform the heroic exploits that you may read of every day.  But much of the great work in the air is done by the scouting planes, which take desperate chances, and find it hard to fight back when they are attacked.  And it was scouts who were above us now—­and, doubtless, sending word back by wireless of a new and mysterious concentration of British forces along the Scarpe, which it might be a good thing for the Hun artillery to strafe a bit!

So, before very long, a rude interruption came to my songs, in the way of shells dropped unpleasantly close.  The men so far above us had given their guns the range, and so, although the gunners could not see us, they could make their presence felt.