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which I still have, was given to me.  On it I drew in ink tqo lines through the target.  One marks the direction from the battery, the other crosses it at right angles.  Other lines were drawn parallel to these, separated by intervals corresponding to 100 meters on the ground.  My job was to spot each shellburst in relation to those lines and to report to the battery, in Morse code, how far it was off target; so many meters over or short, so many to the right or left.  I went over the photograph with Denis, to make sure he knew the location.  He would have to fly back and forth, as I directed him, between the battery and the target.  Once in the air he and I could converse through our speaking tubes, but unfortunately Denis did not understand English and I knew only scraps of French.  Denis was however an old hand at "reglage", and if we had been allowed to follow the original plan I would have needed to use only two words of French: "Allez." and "Tournez.".

Our mission was not to be that simple.  For some reason I never learned the battery commander, after we were in the air, decided to change the game plan.  He told me that, and gave me my new instructions, by displaying certain panels of white cloth on the ground at battery headquarters.  It was the only way he had of getting a message to me.  He had cloth panels of assorted sizes and shapes.  Every observer had to memorize a dozen or so arrangements of those panels, each of which had a different code meaning.  That kind of language could not convey subtle nuances of meaning.  It did suffice to express the simple thoughts of an artilleryman about the aiming and firing of his guns.  But it was infortunately a language that Denis, a pilot, had mot learned.

As soon as we were aloft I unrolled our radio antenna and let it trail in the air behind us.  The length of wire let out determined the wave length on which I was broadcasting, and the battery had been informed of it in advance.  Each means of communication we had was strictly one-way.  The battery talked to me with cloth panels.  I talked to them with dot-dash radio, much of it also in code.  I can remember now only that three dashes meant "Fire!".  The battery was supposed to respond by a salvo; that is by firing each of its four guns at intervals of a few seconds, allowing me time to spot and note each shellburst.

When we reached the battery headquarters I found displayed there a signal that meant "Wait a few minutes".  All I could think of to translate to Denis, was "Attendez".  He understood that it meant "wait", but