How many of them are left to-day?  The smiling officer, so debonair, so proud of his hidden battery, where is he?  The tiny bridge, has it run red this last week?  The watchman in the tree, what did he see, that terrible day when the Germans got across the canal and charged over the flat lands?

The Germans claim to have captured guns at or near this place.  One thing I am sure of:  This battery or another, it was not taken while there were men belonging to it to defend it.  The bridge would run red and the water under the bridge, the muddy field be strewn with bodies, before those cheery, cool-eyed and indomitable French gunners would lose their guns.

The car moved away, fifty feet, a hundred feet, and turned out to avoid an ammunition wagon, disabled in the road.  It was fatal.  We slid off into the mire and settled down.  I looked back at the battery.  A fresh shell was bursting high in the air.

We sat there, interminable hours that were really minutes, while an orderly and the chauffeur dug us out with spades.  We conversed of other things.  But it was a period of uneasiness on my part.  And, as if to point the lesson and adorn the tale, away to the left, rising above the plain, was the church roof with the hole in it—­mute evidence that even the mantle of righteousness is no protection against a shell.

Our course was now along a road just behind the trenches and paralleling them, to an anti-aircraft station.

I have seen a number of anti-aircraft stations at the front:  English ones near the coast and again south of Ypres; guns mounted, as was this French battery, on the plain of a battlefield; isolated cannon in towers and on the tops of buildings and water tanks.  I have seen them in action, firing at hostile planes.  I have never yet seen them do any damage, but they serve a useful purpose in keeping the scouting machines high in the air, thus rendering difficult the work of the enemy’s observer.  The real weapon against the hostile aeroplane is another machine.  Several times I have seen German Taubes driven off by French aviators, and winging a swift flight back to their lines.  Not, one may be sure, through any lack of courage on the part of German aviators.  They are fearless and extremely skilful.  But because they have evidently been instructed to conserve their machines.

I had considerable curiosity as to the anti-aircraft batteries.  How was it possible to manipulate a large field gun, with a target moving at a varying height, and at a speed velocity of, say, sixty miles an hour?

The answer was waiting on the field just north of Ypres.

A brick building by the road was evidently a storehouse for provisions for the trenches.  Unloaded in front of it were sacks of bread, meal and provisions.  And standing there in the sunshine was the commander of the field battery, Captain Mignot.  A tall and bearded man, essentially grave, he listened while Lieutenant Puaux explained the request from General Foch that I see his battery.  He turned and scanned the sky.