The operation of the mobile radio-stations which accompanied the smaller infantry units was always a most hazardous and trying business, requiring not only courage but a very high degree of resourcefulness and self-possession. In one case that I know of a Signal Corps unit received orders to have a trench radio-station installed at a certain exposed point by a certain time. They followed their instructions to the letter, but when their instruments were set up and they were ready for business, they discovered, to their extreme annoyance, that the infantry which was scheduled to occupy the position had failed to materialize and that they and their radio set were well in advance of our lines. From their position in a shell-hole they called up the regimental commander, reported that they were located according to instructions, and inquired what they were expected to do. Whereupon the infantry lost no time in moving up and occupying the position which, as the signalers mockingly asserted, they had been holding for them. The exigencies of the Great War wrought many strange and startling transformations. Scientists who had devoted their entire lives to discovering methods for prolonging life turned their genius to finding new and effective ways of taking it; the tractor of the Western wheat-fields became the tank of the battle-fields in Flanders; the machinery and chemicals used for the manufacture of dyestuffs were converted to the manufacture of poisonous gases—and the dove became the army carrier-pigeon, bearing, instead of the olive-branch of peace, messages of battle. Though I find that many Americans seem to be under the impression that pigeons were unreliable and comparatively little used, they were, as a matter of fact, the most trustworthy of all the systems of message transmission employed by the fighting armies. When everything else failed, when the wires of the field telegraph and telephone had been destroyed by the German shell-storms, when the radio installations had been demolished, when the runners had been killed and the aviators driven back by the air-barrages, it was the pigeons which took the messages through. The official accounts of their exploits read like the wildest fiction. Over 500 birds were used by our troops in the St. Mihiel offensive alone. Through the messages brought by pigeons, American Headquarters learned of the whereabout of Major Whittlesey and his “Lost Battalion.” How trustworthy were these winged messengers is proved by the carefully kept records of the Allied Armies, which show that of the thousands of messages intrusted to pigeons during the four years of the war, _96 per cent were delivered_.