Our land battles during these days are being conducted mainly at night as fights between patrols, the war in the day time being mainly in the air. On October 16th a German plane which had been separated from its escadrille came wabbling over the heads of Major Lawrence’s group and landed in a field alongside them, the occupants being made prisoners. Two days later I had the good luck to witness from the same spot a unique spectacle. There had been an air fight in which ours got the better of it. A German plane was evidently in a bad way. As we watched it we saw a dark object drop from it, and while we held our breath in sympathetic terror for a human being dropping to destruction, a parachute opened above him—the first instance of the kind we have seen in this war. Captain Bootz, who was under him at the time, said that he managed it by climbing out on the tail of his plane and dropping off it from the rear. The great difficulty about using a parachute for aviators has been that the on-moving plane hits the ropes before they can drop clear. Most of the air fights have been the result of the determination of the Germans to get our balloons. They brought down four of them one afternoon, much to our disgust. There is a stock story about the rookie who is persuaded by his fellows that his tin hat is guaranteed by the government to turn the direct hit of a German 77. When Colonel Dravo and the rest of us start to tell how an inch of planking turned a German 77, we shall be greeted with smiles of incredulity, but the thing actually happened. Dravo has a pleasant little Chalet out on the hill 263, beautifully situated in the forest and affording an excellent place of repose for weary American officers if the Germans who were kind enough to build it would only leave their work alone. But the hill is shelled by day and shelled and bombed by night, in a picky sort of a way. A small portion of the shack is boarded off for a kitchen and in it sleep, or rather slept, for they don’t like the place any more, the force of our Headquarters mess: Sergeant Denis Donovan, Jimmy Dayton, Tex Blake, McWalter, and John McLaughlin in superimposed bunks, so that the lads above were only a couple of feet below the roof. A shell hit just above them, the explosion ruining the roof and pitching them all to the floor; but every particle of iron in it spread itself into the air outside of the building. Luckily for them it must have been one of those long-nosed devils that explode on contact and cause much greater destruction than those that plow out the ordinary shell hole. The first time I saw the roads barely scratched where they hit I thought the German powder was becoming inferior. I know better now. HALLOWE’EN