It was a sleepy old-world town hidden away in the sunny hills of Northern France, with a broad highway leading from the town in either direction and easily distinguishable from the air as being a first-class or main road, by its extraordinary width and the superabundance of traffic passing to and fro. We were still flying low and could easily distinguish the long strings of motor cars, convoys of ambulance wagons, supply and ammunition columns. In one place a battalion of reinforcements, marching up towards the firing line with their transport wagons in the rear. Further up and nearer to the firing line were a string of motor ’buses, crowded outside with Tommies, their bayonets gleaming silver as they caught the rays of the early sun. In another place a small traction-engine was hauling a chain of limbers, on which were the parts of a “grandmother” (naval 15-inch gun) being hurried up to take part in that murderous duel along the lines. We are now getting nearer the dreaded area, and for the sake of comfort and safety have to climb higher. The surface of the earth, however, still remains distinct. The long gray winding lines of trenches stretch away to the north and south as far as the eye can reach. In some places as much as half a mile divides them, in others they are so close together, that from above they appear to “kiss.” But our happy soliloquizing is broken by the burst of a shrapnel shell in the near vicinity. No more time for thought now. A SOFT JOB Diving, climbing, banking, anywhere to get away from those awful shells, and who can give description to the dreadful sensations one undergoes the first time under shrapnel fire in mid-air? Heaven and earth seem to be rent in twain by those murderous little balls of smoke and flame and lead. One’s past life rises before one’s eyes, sometimes most unpleasantly. Shells burst all round, above, below, to the left, to the right. At one moment over the nose of the machine, the next beneath the tail. Once hit, and the aeroplane and its occupants will plunge down to an agonizing death on the ground, many thousands of feet below. “And this,” once remarked a cynic of one of the flying Services, “is what the men in the trenches call a soft job.” By the time we have the opportunity of looking over the side again, we are well into the enemy’s country. In appearance this is an almost absolute replica of the area behind our own lines. There are the reserve trenches; there the big-gun emplacement and the advance hospitals, battalion, brigade and divisional headquarters, and far, very far, in the background, the German G. H. Q. AN ENEMY MACHINE