During the battle of the Aisne, from the 12th to the 15th of September, the British forced the passage of the river and captured the Aisne heights including the Chemin des Dames. Thereafter fighting degenerated into a sullen trench warfare, culminating on the 26th of September and the two following days in a series of fierce attacks by the Germans. These attacks were repulsed and were not again renewed. On the 12th of September Lieutenant L. Dawes and Lieutenant W. R. Freeman, of No. 2 Squadron, had a notable adventure. They left in the morning to carry out an aerial reconnaissance to St.-Quentin. A little south of Anizy-le-Chateau, between Soissons and Laon, their machine began to rock and vibrate in the air, as if the tail were loose. They planed down at once, and landed in a small field, finishing up in a wood, where they damaged their undercarriage, wings, and airscrew. Large German columns were on the roads on both sides of them, within about two hundred yards. Taking only a biscuit and some tubes of beef extract with them, they hid in another wood close by. Some German cavalry came up to the machine, and then went all round the first wood, but found nothing, and after an hour and a half went away. The two officers lay hid until the evening, and then started in the direction of the Aisne, some eight miles distant. During the night they passed several German pickets, but the war was young, the spirit of exhilaration still prevailed in the German army, and the pickets were making so much noise that they passed unobserved. At 3.0 in the morning they reached the Aisne, where they lay down and slept. At 6.0 they were wakened by the firing of a gun close by, and realized that they were in front of the German position. German cavalry patrolled the road in front of them, and they were under heavy shell-fire from the British. They swam the Aisne, dried their clothes in a house by the canal, and then walked to the British guns, which were still in action. They were given food by the Third Cavalry Brigade, and were taken back on a supply column to rejoin their squadron after an absence of more than two days. It might be supposed that their troubles were now at an end, but they had yet to face their squadron commander, Major Burke, who sternly rebuked them for violating the order that no two pilots should fly together in the same machine. The work of observation now entered a new phase. When armies are in fixed positions movement behind the front and along the lines of communication does not greatly vary from day to day. The Flying Corps were employed to map out the enemy's chief railheads, his aerodromes (which were surprisingly numerous), his camps, and his dumps. They began also to observe the positions of enemy batteries in order to range them for our own artillery, and they made some attempts to take photographs from the air of the enemy trenches and lines of communication.