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War is not all grey and grim and hideous.  It has its lighter moments.  The more terrible a situation the more keen is human nature to forget it for a time.  Men play between shells in the trenches.  London, suffering keenly, flocks to a comedy or a farce as a relief from strain.  Wounded men, past their first agony, chaff each other in the hospitals.  There are long hours behind the lines when people have tea and try to forget for a little while what is happening just ahead.

Some seven miles behind the trenches, in that vague “Somewhere in France,” the British Army had established a naval air-station, where one of its dirigible airships was kept.  In good weather the airship went out on reconnoissance.  It was not a large airship, as such things go, and was formerly a training ship.  Now it was housed in an extemporised hangar that was once a carwheel works, and made its ascent from a plain surrounded by barbed wire.

The airship men were extremely hospitable, and I made several visits to the station.  On the day of which I am about to write I was taken for an exhaustive tour of the premises, beginning with the hangar and ending with tea.  Not that it really ended with tea.  Tea was rather a beginning, leading to all sorts of unexpected and surprising things.

The airship was out when I arrived, and a group of young officers was watching it, a dot on the horizon near the front.  They gave me the glasses, and I saw it plainly—­a long, yellowish, slowly moving object that turned as I looked and headed back for the station.

The group watched the sky carefully.  A German aeroplane could wreck the airship easily.  But although there were planes in sight none was of the familiar German lines.

It came on.  Now one could see the car below.  A little closer and three dots were the men in it.  On the sandy plain which is the landing field were waiting the men whose work it is to warp the great balloon into its hangar.  The wind had come up and made landing difficult.  It was necessary to make two complete revolutions over the field before coming down.  Then the blunt yellow nose dipped abruptly.  The men below caught the ropes, the engine was cut off, and His Majesty’s airship, in shape and colour not unlike a great pig, was safely at home again and being led to the stable.

“Do you want to know the bravest man in all the world?” one of the young officers said.  “Because here he is.  The funny thing about it is he doesn’t know he is brave.”

That is how I met Colonel M——­, who is England’s greatest airship man and who is in charge of the naval air station.

“If you had come a little sooner,” he said, “you could have gone out with us.”

I was grateful but unenthusiastic.  I had seen the officers watching the sky for German planes.  I had a keen idea that a German aviator overhead, armed with a Belgian block or a bomb or a dart, could have ripped that yellow envelope open from stem to stern, and robbed American literature of one of its shining lights.  Besides, even in times of peace I am afraid to look out of a third-story window.