'1HE YPRES TIMES
151
If any reader of this true story knows of any such incident among the observers
who, high in the air, kept their lonely watch on the movements of the attackers who
lay in wait around this vital bastion of the Allied armies, I should be most grateful to
hear if this curious dream reproduced an actual happening. There seems no other
probable explanation of it.
As I have written of an incident which may or may not have happened to an
observer of a Kite^Balloon section of the R.A.F. or R.F.C. I should like to record here
my complete admiration of the spirit
of this very gallant section of the
armies of the Great War.
It must be want of imagination
that has allowed the services of
these devoted men to pass almost
unnoticed.
As a gunner I know how much of
the information that came to hand
from our Intelligence departments
was due to their untiring services.
It needed a very special kind of
courage to hang suspended high in
the air at the end of a cable fastened
to a lorry, an easy mark for every
prowling enemy airman, with a
huge bag of inflammable gas over
head, and a flimsy-looking cable
and a telephone wire as the sole
connection with the ground. In
high wind the gyrations of the
balloon caused dreadful seasickness
and both hands were needed for
safety. In spite of these things
they managed bv determination and
doggedness to register our guns on
essential targets and enabled us to
keep down machine gun fire from
pill-boxes sited so as to enfilade the
attacking waves of infaijtry.
They presented an eternal target
to long-range guns that fired H.E.
airbursts at them. JMo trench or
dugout was there for them to dive
into when the crash of an airburst
shook the air beside them or when
the whine of machine-gun bullets
was heard. Should the cable nart
in a high Westerley wind an im-
Photo]
[Imperial War Museum, Crown Copyright.
parachute coming down from a blazing
mediate parachute descent was the kite-balloon
only way to avoid a trip to a German prison camp, and in one case at least this fate
was only avoided by so rapid a drop as to involve a pair of broken legs.
All of this cold courage had to be produced without the encouragement of the
presence of any fellow-soldier, the hardest test of all.
So let every fighting soldier join with me in saying HATS OFF TO THE
BALLOONATICS as we used to call them. A. D. T.
