Evening capital and Maryland gazette. (Annapolis, Md.) 1910-1922, 1919-02-15
THE EYE BEHIND
THE LINES

b the eternal fitness of thirgs Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle should write this
sory. sor Id the spellbound hours Ia
which lac0nfc brown men IL khaki and
horizon blue. gave Il TO me, ! vis-
.nalized no one so much as sherlock
Holmes. grim. brooding. and penetra-
ting. Kidding IN their places miles over
the smoke of Flanders; sitting IN their
places i'd the map-littered dngouts be-
hind the lines Of battle, IN sangling
the mysteries Of uncanny secrets II
III the story of the greatest detective
system ever devised BY man, the inner
story Of how the allies by aerial pho-
Biography and weird deduction from
meaningless prints Of the German
lines solved the riddles OF the foe the
story of the camera, the best spy of
all time Into this sorry will come
the strange case OF the human foot
print and the countless things 81
stealth ii revealed, also the curious
s.rognes gallery OF German generals
which the allied detectives collected,
kept. and used with such sure might
also the 0Qu put Dt6AAhihS
must be made
! There Is no more astonishing thing
fiji the whole marvel of aerial photog-
raphy than the cameras ability 70
catch the trail 81 walking man. AL
Two and a half miles in the air the or
binary aerial camera VIII show the
footprints Of a man going across
slightly shelled ground At d mile Il
will show them on new-mown grass.
All ave miles 1t will reveal them trail
ing across NO Mans Land
Consider this: Once the French
were planning to take certain hill,
knowing that BayarIAn 'LandsturIn
poor machine gun lighters held i
weakly. At dawn photographer went
up, came dashing back with a picture,
and fifteen minutes later the French
general called on the attack and saved
the lives of thousands Of his men. And
YET the camera had caught no remark
able thing. ii merely showed that one
group OF men had gone out and an
other come into the trenches during
the night. The footprints Of the Ger
mans told that much The incoming
trail. followed back. was found To-
emerge from woods, lying beside a
fine white road The allied detectives
bending over their prints, followed
that road to the nearest German can
tonment and proved BIZ still other pho
tographs that the cantonment was
held held By Prussians Presto. The
French stan knew that crack Prus-
SLAMS were opposing them, and thai II
would be nothing short of suicide TO
attack
Deduction of this sort was more
than half OF the work Of the aerial
photography sections or the allied
armies. The work of swapping Pic
lures from the air was picturesque
dangerous, heroic: but for thrill and
and romance give me those sweating.
silent men In the dugouts, studying
photographs by the hour catching q
clue, here. q telltale mark there, that
made Hindenburg's plans an open
book
Modern Photographic science laid
before each allied general complete
picture of everything the enemy was
doing and almost everything II was
going to do II showed him unmis-
takably what his own men we're doing
and what they could DO.
Napoleon could but guess what
wellington was planning: Foch could
send up photographer and within
an hour know what Ludendorff was
thinking 81 Douglas Reid. IN the
March Popular Mechanics Magazine