Taking a pair of binoculars, I look and see the three British barricades of sandbags, for the ground here is too wet to permit of the digging of trenches. Men are seen sitting down or walking up and down behind these breastworks, and beyond can be seen the spiky curls and haphazard pegs of the barbed-wire entanglements. In the centre, a grey huddle of stone indicates the site of Lombartsyde Church. Now and again a cloud of smoke from a shell rises up behind the German trench. On the left are the sand-dunes on which the tall, red, broken houses of Westende stand desolate and fantastically suburban against the sky. I can see through the glasses the great painted advertisements on them, and notice here and there the missing roof, the shattered wall; but on the whole, save for the blank square of the glassless windows, they look untouched enough. It seems strange to think that the bare lifeless buildings of that watering town are full of an unseen life, that up in those roofs Germans are watching us only a few hundred yards away, as we are watching them. It is strange and uncanny. This, then, is the line--bleak, dead, full of a sense of ever-menacing danger, haunted by the hovering phantom of Death. We take a last look and start back to the car. The farther we go, the easier grows my heart. When at last we turn the corner of the town and see the old grey tender with its driver smoking beside it, I want to hail it as a welcome friend. Gladly we hear its engine throb--gladly we feel the thrill of movement--gladly we move down the eerie desolate road, by the canvas screens, the broken trees, where sounds the wail and bang of the shells, like doors in a great frightening empty house being shut and shut by some unseen and terrifying phantom hand. Swiftly we leave the desolate loneliness of war behind, and welcome is the thought of the trim camp at the aerodrome with its flower-decked mess and fire-lit cabins. When at last we sweep across the little white bridge over the canal and stop beside the lawns of the quarter-deck, over which flaps the White Ensign, I realise keenly the comfort and the tranquillity of my life. Now it is the twilight of dusk. Though day still reigns supreme in untarnished brightness, there is a feeling in the air that the end is coming, and night surely must vanquish soon. Out from the aerodrome are being wheeled the Handley-Page machines, and I hurry through my task of synchronising the watches. To-night I raid not, and from the beginning my feelings are mixed. I am glad I am not going, and I am bitterly sorry too, because I know when, in the late hours of starlight, one by one the huge machines glide whistling to earth, and into the mess the furred and helmeted airmen tramp on great fleece-lined boots, I will envy the glorious sense of achievement, of well-earned rest, which will then be theirs.