On this morning the first indication that they had that their time was up was the swooping down of a cluster of birds of death on all sides. The weather was foggy, a stiff wind blowing and the basket swinging from side to side. This was the first time an attempt had been made to float a balloon in the Ypres salient, as the danger was too obvious to take the risk. However, as I say, the chance was taken. It so happened that our guns were taking a breathing spell, and we stood on the top of our gun pit eagerly watching the fall of the balloon and its escape. The road along which the armored truck had run ran at one point quite close to the German lines, and the airplanes were now coming thicker every moment and bombing it from every quarter. Telephone and telegraph wires running from trenches to headquarters and all parts of the lines intervened between the balloon and safety, and there was nothing for them but to cut the wires to let the bag get through. Each minute the danger increased, but the men in the truck scrambled up the poles, nipped the wire with their nippers, and the balloon passed through. This was done repeatedly before it reached its haven. Bets were freely made by every man in my gun crew, with the odds of 5 to 1, that the Huns would get it. Somehow I had an inspiration that she would navigate the storm, and I took up all the offers in my battery against the bag--and lost. Her mission of observation had been accomplished, but when she got through the wires she floated to the wagon line, and the result of her arrival here was disastrous in the extreme, as the German shells followed the bag as assiduously as any bunch of schoolboys snowballing a foe, and hundreds of splendid horses were mangled to a jelly by the explosion amongst them. When it got to the wagon line the crew on the truck commenced to pull it down as rapidly as they could, but when half-way to the ground a flying shell split the cable in twain as neatly as it could have been done with a razor blade, and the bag floated away with the remaining two men out over the German lines. When the descent had commenced two of the crew had taken to their parachutes and got away safely. Anti-aircraft guns now opened up on it from our lines in an endeavor to destroy it and prevent it getting into the hands of the enemy, and German airplanes and anti-aircraft guns were also firing at it, so that it was a target for all concerned. This, perhaps, is about the only incident in the entire war to date where both the British and the Germans were equally bent upon the destruction of a common object. The wind suddenly changed and a steady current of air in the other direction brought it back over our own lines; then the two remaining men seized the opportunity to leave the floater in their parachutes, dropping to safety. A bevy of our planes then went after it, riddled it with rifle bullets, causing the gas to escape, and it finally sank majestically to the ground.