Flash-lights have come into their own in this war.  One would as soon think of living without a flash-light as he would think of travelling without clothes in Greenland.  It simply cannot be done.  In any city, from Paris to the smallest towns on the front, one must have his flash-light.  The streets of the cities and towns of France are a hundred times more crooked than those of Boston.  If Boston’s streets followed the cow-paths, the streets of the cities of France followed cows with the St. Vitus dance.  Around these streets one had to find his way by night with a flash-light, especially during an air-raid.  One must have a flash, too, for the houses and hotels when an air-raid is on, and one must have it when one is driving a big truck or an automobile down along the front lines, for no lights are permitted on any machines, official or otherwise, after a certain point is reached.  One of the favorite outdoor sports of this preacher for a month was to lie on his stomach on the front mud-guard of a big Pierce-Arrow through the war-zone roads, bumping over shell-holes, with a little pocket flash-light playing on the ground, searching out the shell-holes, and trying to help the driver keep in the road.  It is a delightful occupation about two o’clock in the morning, with a blizzard blowing, and knowing that the big truck is rumbling along within sight and sound of the German big guns.  Trucks make more noise on such occasions than a Twentieth Century Limited.  “No lights beyond divisional headquarters” was the order, and night after night we travelled along these roads with only an occasional flash of the Ever Ready to guide.  And so it is that the flash-light has come to its own, and every private soldier, officer, and citizen in France is equipped with one.  He would be like a swordfish without its sword if he didn’t have it.

LADDER OF LIGHT

Then suddenly you see a strange finger of light reaching into the sky.  Or you may liken it to a ladder of light climbing the sky.  Or you may liken it to a lance of light piercing the darkness.  Or you may just call it a good, old-fashioned search-light, which it is.  It is watching for Hun planes, and it plays all night long from north to south, from east to west, restlessly, eagerly, quickly, like a “hound of the heavens” guarding the earth.  First it sweeps the horizon, and then it suddenly shoots straight up into the zenith like another sun, and it seems to flood the very skies.  No German plane can cut through that path of light without being seen, and one night I had the rare privilege of seeing a plane caught by the search-light on its ever-vigilant patrol.  It was a thrilling sight.  One minute later the anti-aircraft guns were thundering away and the shrapnel was breaking in tiny patches around this plane while the search-lights played on both the plane and the shrapnel patches of smoke against the sky, making a wonderful picture.  Military writers say that the enemy planes are more afraid of these search-lights than of the guns.