"Hour after hour, day and night, with increasing intensity as the time went on, the enemy rained heavy shell into the area. Now he would send them crashing in on a line south of the road--eight heavy shells at a time, minute after minute followed by a burst of shrapnel. Now he would place a curtain straight across this valley or that till the sky and landscape were blotted out.... Day and night the men worked through it, fighting the horrid machinery far over the horizon as if they were fighting Germans hand to hand, building up whatever it battered down, burying some of them, not once, but again and again and again. What is a barrage against such troops? They went through it as you would go through a summer shower, too proud to bend their heads, many of them, because their mates were looking. As one of the best of their officers said to me: 'I have to walk about as if I liked it; what else can you do when your own men teach you to?'" PART IX--THE WAR IN THE AIR CHAPTER LIII THE VALUE OF ZEPPELINS IN LONG-DISTANCE RECONNOITERING--NAVAL AUXILIARIES The growing intensity and fierceness of the gigantic struggle between the great nations of the world in the second half of the second year naturally was reflected in the extraordinary activities of the aerial fleets of the combatants. To give in detail the thousands of individual and mass attacks is manifestly impossible in a restricted work of this kind, and we shall have to be satisfied with a description of the more important events in this latest of all warfares. Undoubtedly the most pronounced feature of aerial combat in 1916 was the complete rehabilitation of the Zeppelin type of rigid airship construction as an invaluable aid to the land and naval forces in the difficult and dangerous task of reconnoitering the enemy forces. There can be no doubt that the frequent raids of the eastern counties of Great Britain were undertaken far more with the idea of gaining as clear an idea as possible of the distribution of British naval units in the North Sea than with the desire of hurling destruction from the sky upon sleeping villages, towns, and, of course, harbors and factories which might be of value to the British military forces. And there also can be no doubt that for this purpose of reconnoitering over immense areas the Zeppelin airship stands to-day unchallenged by any other single means at the disposal of the army leaders.