It is a great game.  Seven or eight thousand feet high, directly over the British planes, is a single Taube cruising for the same purpose.  It looks like a beetle with gossamer wings suspended from a light cloud.  The British aviators are so low that the bull’s-eye identification marks are distinctly visible to the naked eye.  They are playing in and out, like the short stop and second baseman around second, there in the very arc of the passing shells from both sides fired at other targets.  But scores of other shells are most decidedly meant for them.  In the midst of a lacework of puffs of shrapnel-bursts, which slowly spread in the still air, from the German anti-aircraft guns, they dip and rise and turn in skilful dodging.  At length, one retires for good; probably his plane-cloth has become too much like a sieve from shrapnel-fragments to remain aloft longer.

Come down, Herr Taube, come down where we can have a shot at you I Get in the game!  You can see better at the altitude of the British airmen!  But Herr Taube always stays high—­the Br’er Fox of the air.  Of course, it was not so exciting as the pictures that artists draw, but it was real.

Every kind of shell was being fired, low and high velocity, small and large calibre.  One-two-three-four in as quick succession as the roll of a drum, four German shells burst in line up in the region where we have made ourselves masters of the German trench.  British shells responded.

“Ours again!”

But I had already ducked before I spoke, as you might if a pellet of steel weighing a couple of hundred pounds, going at the rate of a thousand yards a second or more, passed within a few yards of your head—­ducked to find myself looking into the face of a soldier who was smiling.  The smile was not scornful, but it was at least amused at the expense of the sightseer who had dodged one of our own shells.  In addition to the respirators in case of a possible gas attack, supplied by that staff officer with a twinkle in his eye, we needed a steel rod fastened to the back of our necks and running down our spinal columns in order to preserve our dignity.

We were witnessing what is called the “artillery preparation for an infantry attack,” which was to try to recover that two hundred yards of trench from the British.  Only the Germans did not limit their attention to the lost trench.  It was hottest there around the bend of our line, from our view-point; for there they must maul the trench into formless debris and cut the barbed wire in front of it before the charge was made.

“They touch up all the trenches in the neighbourhood to keep us guessing,” said the officer, “before they make their final concentration.  So it’s pretty thick around this part.”

“Which might include the communication trench?”

“Certainly.  This makes a good line shot.  No doubt they will spare us a few when they think it is our turn.  We do the same thing.  So it goes.”