Circling upward they finally reached an altitude of about five thousand feet. Tom knew this partly from intuition, and then again he could see the face of the altimeter used to register height. After that for ten minutes they flew almost directly north.
Then the sergeant throttled down to await the coming of other machines that were expected to take some part in the venture. Tom busied himself in looking down upon the region of Verdun—a name ever to be inscribed on the pages of French history as commemorating deeds of unequaled valor on the part of her heroic sons.
The country could not be distinguished in detail from such a height. It presented a flat surface of varicolored figures. The woods were irregular blocks, dun-colored, with patches of dark green where evergreen trees grew; the roads could be traced running this way and that in white lines, often crossing. Fields were in geometric squares, and at another season of the year might have looked green.
Over beyond lay the Meuse, sparkling in the 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 pock-marks dotting the landscape all around Verdun. These he knew must be what they called “shell-craters,” 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.”
“Why, even the roads have all been obliterated,” Tom was telling himself, as he looked, overcome with a feeling of horror.
Every sign of humanity had been swept away; roads and woods were gone utterly; and where the restful French villages once nestled, nothing could be seen but gray smears where stone walls had tumbled together.