It lay about for days. Albert now
admits his theory was wrong; the mole is a vegetarian, he says; he was
confusing it with trout. He is in the throes of inventing an explosive
potato for Maurice on the lines of a percussion grenade, but in the
meanwhile that gentleman remains in complete mastery of the situation.
The balloon attached to our back garden is very tame. Every morning
its keepers lead it forth from its abode by strings, tie it to a
longer string and let it go. All day it remains aloft, tugging gently
at its leash and keeping an eye on the War. In the evening the keepers
appear once more, haul it down and lead it home for the night. It
reminds me for all the world of a huge docile elephant being bossed
about by the mahout's infant family. I always feel like giving the
gentle creature a bun.
Now and again the Bosch birds come over disguised as clouds and spit
mouthfuls of red-hot tracer-bullets at it, and then the observers hop
out. One of them "hopped out" into my horse-lines last week. That is
to say his parachute caught in a tree and he hung swinging, like a
giant pendulum, over my horses' backs until we lifted him down. He
came into "_Mon Repos_" to have bits of tree picked out of him. This
was the sixth plunge overboard he had done in ten days, he told us.
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