Sometimes they are the flashes, the fleet, swallow-like flashes, of an enemy plane caught in the burning, blazing path of a search-light, and then hounded by it to its death.

Sometimes they are signals flashed from the top of a cruiser on the high seas across the storm-tossed waters to a little destroyer, which flashes back its answer, and then in turn flashes a message of light to one of the convoying planes overhead in the dim dusk of early evening.

Sometimes these Sky Silhouettes are the range-finders that poise in the air for a few seconds, guiding the air patrols home, and sometimes they are just the varied, interesting, gleaming, flashing “Lights of War.”

XII

THE LIGHTS OF WAR

One’s introduction into the war zone and into war-zone cities and villages, and one’s visits “down the line” to the front by night, will always be filled with the thrill of the unusual because of the Lights of War.  Where lights used to be, there are no lights now, and where they were not seen before the war, they are radiant and rampant now.

The first place that an American traveller notices this absence of lights is on the boat crossing over the Atlantic.  From the first night out of New York the boats travel without a single light showing.  Every light inside of the boat is covered with a heavy black crape, and the port-holes and windows are so scrupulously and carefully chained down that the average open-air fiend from California or elsewhere feels that he will suffocate before morning comes, and even in the bitterest of winter weather I have known some fresh-air fiends to prefer the deck of the ship, with all of its bitter winds and cold, to the inside of a cabin with no windows open.  I stood on the deck of an ocean liner “Somewhere on the Atlantic” a few months ago as the great ship was ploughing its zigzag course through the black waters, dodging submarines.  There was not a star in the sky.  There was not a light on the boat.  Absolutely the only lights that one saw was when he leaned over the railing and saw the splash of innumerable phosphorescent organisms breaking against the boat.  I have seen the like of it only once before, and this was on the Pacific down at Asilomar one evening, when the waves were running fire with phosphorescence.  It was a beautiful sight there and on the Atlantic too.

IT WAS MIDNIGHT

On this particular night, as far as one could see, this brilliant organic light illuminated the sea like the hands of my luminous wrist-watch were made brilliant by phosphorescence.  I noticed this and looked down at my watch to see what time it was.  It was midnight.

As I looked, my friend, who was standing beside me on the deck, said:  “The last order is that no wrist-watches that are luminous may be exposed on the decks at night.  That order came along with the order forbidding smoking on the decks at night.  The Germans can sight the light of a cigar a long distance through their periscopes.”