The Birmingham age-herald., 1917-10-28

had once been town. near a long lake, German shells were raining down. It seemed that hundreds were bursting at once. Grayish smoke rose from most of them but every 30 seconds or so great black column larger than the rest spurted up. No doubt "coal box" or Jack Johnson" Then a shell would hit the lake and up would shoot the water like the splashes near She ships in the pictures of naval bat ties. These were all German shells coming from the numerically inferior German guns. but the number of guns it must have taken to keep that ava lanche going staggers thought.
 The British guns did not seem to be firing much We could see over the floor of a great valley as large as Manhattan Island where British guns undoubtedly lived. but only an occas- ionaly bright flash betrayed their pres ence. The Germans were evidently preparing an attack When their men went over the top perhaps something would happen in the valley. Tn due course it did We saw no Germans Ego over''--it was all too far away but suddenly as if by magic, the whole vast valley began to light up. Flash followed flash so quickly and so often that the eye could not begin to follow or the brain form an estimate of how many there were. It continued as We watched, for just about a minute. Then it suddenly stopped. There was no doub in he minds of any of us that the German attack must have stopped, too. The valley calmly resumed it's occasional and intermittent flashing, but for minute we had seen a little of what lay hidden there. The German shells were still raining down on the bare patch of ground.
 This was the only incident out of scores. As we looked at the country back of the German lines, sudden fires would break out We saw three burn ing at the same time, trailing their smoke across the landscape. Quite near us plainly visible to the naked eye was a solitary little tent pitched on slope of ground. Suddenly shell landed within few yards of it. There had previously been no sign of life about the tent, but the flap opened and man emerged. He stood and looked a [ the place on which the shell had burst and then went inside again Per- haps he had been asleep. Anyway we did not see him again.
 ACROBATS OF THE AIR
 All this and much more besides was happening on the ground but as at the cIICuS, Olteil tue pldCe lO lOOk was III the air where the acrobats perform. All along the miles of front airplanes were flying. Over one place in particular about 40 of them were wheeling and cir cling like a swarm of flies. It seemed curious that they didn't hit each other. It was difficult to tell how far away they were and often they were mere specks in the sky, which would lose themselves as you looked. Then you would find four or five or 10 where q moment before there had been but one The anti-aircraft guns, or "Archies,' were hard at work and all day long the sky was full of little puffs of smoke from their bursting shells. The German puffs are black and the British white so 1t was easy to distinguish which side had to do the most firing.
 What we saw was an object lesson on who held the air supremacy, for there were 50 black puffs to one white Very occasionally white puffs would appear and then we sometimes thought we could see solitary German machine with numerous British in pur- suit, but unless one is very near it is impossible to tell what is happening in the air. We saw no airplanes fall and it is doubtful if we would have had we watched for 10 days instead of one Men who have been at the front for months and months have never seen one SnOt down. ms seems lncreulDle, put IL admirably illustrates the size of the thing. Many people who live in London never see a street accident from one end of the year to another, and yet a huge number of pedestrians are injured every day.
 Towards the end of the day a num- Der of captive sausage balloons began tC rise into the air. They kept on appear ing in the most unexpected places un- til they formed long line like some great buoys at sea, holding up an imag