The balloon was descending.  I asked permission to go up in it, but when I saw it near at hand I withdrew the request.  It had no basket, like the ones I had seen before, but instead the observers, two of them, sat astride a horizontal bar.

The English balloons have a basket beneath, I am told.  One English airship man told me that to be sent up in a stationary balloon was the greatest penalty a man could be asked to pay.  The balloon jerks at the end of its rope like a runaway calf, and “the resulting nausea makes sea-sickness seem like a trip to the Crystal Palace.”

So I did not go up in that observation balloon on the field of Ypres.  We got out of the car, and trudged after the balloon as it was carried to its new position by many soldiers.  We stood by as it rose again above the tree tops, the rope and the telephone wire hanging beneath it.  But what the observers saw that afternoon from their horizontal bar I do not yet know—­trenches, of course.  But trenches are interesting in this war only when their occupants have left them and started forward.  Batteries and ammunition trains, probably, the latter crawling along the enemy’s roads.  But both of these can be better and more easily located by aeroplanes.

The usefulness of the captive balloon in this war is doubtful.  It serves, at the best, to take the place of an elevation of land in this flat country, is a large and tempting target, and can serve only on very clear days, when there is no ground mist—­a difficult thing to achieve in Flanders.

We were getting closer to the front all the time.  As the automobile jolted on, drawing out for transports, for ambulances and ammunition wagons, the two French officers spoke of the heroism of their men.  They told me, one after the other, of brave deeds that had come under their own observation.

“The French common soldier is exceedingly brave—­quite reckless,” one of them said.  “Take, for instance, the case, a day or so ago, of Philibert Musillat, of the 168th Infantry.  We had captured a communication trench from the Germans and he was at the end of it, alone.  There was a renewal of the German attack, and they came at him along the trench.  He refused to retreat.  His comrades behind handed him loaded rifles, and he killed every German that appeared until they lay in a heap.  The Germans threw bombs at him, but he would not move.  He stood there for more than twelve hours!”

There were many such stories, such as that of the boys of the senior class of the military school of St. Cyr, who took, the day of the beginning of the war, an oath to put on gala dress, white gloves and a red, white and blue plume, when they had the honour to receive the first order to charge.

They did it, too.  Theatrical?  Isn’t it just splendidly boyish?  They did it, you see.  The first of them to die, a young sub-lieutenant, was found afterward, his red, white and blue plume trampled in the mud, his brave white gloves stained with his own hot young blood.  Another of these St. Cyr boys, shot in the face hideously and unable to speak, stood still under fire and wrote his orders to his men.  It was his first day under fire.