The latter's looks were distraught; he was trying to interpret a
mysterious picture which everywhere he saw before his eyes--"Up
there, from the sky, you don't see much, you know. Among the squares
of the fields and the little heaps of the villages the roads run
like white cotton. You can make out, too, some hollow threads that
look as if they'd been traced with a pin-point and scratched through
fine sand. These nets that festoon the plain with regularly wavy
marks, they're the trenches. Last Sunday morning I was flying over
the firing-line. Between our first lines and their first lines,
between their extreme edges, between the fringes of the two huge
armies that are up against each other, looking at each other and not
seeing, and waiting--it's not very far; sometimes forty yards,
sometimes sixty. To me it looked about a stride, at the great height
where I was planing. And behold I could make out two crowds, one
among the Boches, and one of ours, in these parallel lines that
seemed to touch each other; each was a solid, lively lump, and all
around 'em were dots like grains of black sand scattered on gray
sand, and these hardly budged--it didn't look like an alarm! So I
went down several turns to investigate.
"Then I understood. It was Sunday, and there were two religious
services being held under my eyes--the altar, the padre, and all the
crowd of chaps. The more I went down the more I could see that the
two things were alike--so exactly alike that it looked silly.
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