Page:Air Service Boys Flying for France.djvu/160

Rh sunlight. Far below hung a double line of the irregular sausage-shaped observation balloons, each secured by rope to a giant windlass by means of which they were raised and lowered readily.

Verdun lay just beyond, with its many red-tiled houses; though here and there could be seen an appalling gap, indicating where a great shell had caused devastation in the midst of the buildings.

Using his powerful binoculars Tom was able to note a multitude of what seemed tiny pockmarks dotting the landscape all around Verdun. These he knew must be what they called "shellcraters," being the vast excavations caused by the explosion of shells hurled from the monster guns of the Germans, placed, it may have been, twenty miles distant at the time.

Once across the Meuse, Tom saw a broad brown band running from the Woevre plain westward to the "S" bend of the river; and on the left bank of the Meuse it kept on until it reached the Argonne Forest.

Well he knew that many months back that country had been made up of a myriad of peaceful farms and villages. Now it was a blackened waste, a sinister belt that as one writer describes it "seems like a strip of murdered Nature, and to belong to another world."