Page:War's dark frame (IA warsdarkframe00camp).pdf/283

Rh a lonely spot. The conspirator behind the lines was supposed to find the basket, fasten duplicates of his message to each bird, and release them all. The innocent-appearing empty basket would be the only evidence left.

The aeroplane has revolutionised spying as completely as it has scouting. It's a risky business. It's even unpopular among the air corps—as courageous a body of youngsters as war has ever produced. I have shown them to you, sailing through bursting shrapnel, photographing and observing with impudent indifference. In an air battle they will take suicidal chances, but they don't like these quiet rides through the night to lonely places.

It isn't that they are physically afraid. They shrink from the work because it threatens the spy's penalty. The airman, like his passenger, is tried, condemned, and executed as a spy. And these boys, who know less than the quiet, worried men in London, Paris, and Petrograd, or in Vienna and Berlin, have a horror of the spy's work and the spy's death. Still they do it. It amounts to this: Among the British and the French the belief in this war is so general that to ask for volunteers for any task is practically to take your pick of the entire army. This particular stratagem, moreover, must be seen through in the face