Heaven only knows what the officers must think who sit in the observing compartment as did I, though they know that this upward climb has a purpose, a purpose of war, as I was soon to see. More faint, then befogged, became the diaphanously veiled earth. Clouds interspersed, graying the vision, clouds and a drifting, wet mist that settled in beads on the glass of my goggles so that I was continually rubbing away with my gloved fingers. We were hidden now, from the earth, and the earth from us. Marching gray gloom all around, ghostly wet wisps that straggled past, caressing one's face. In that Nomad's void, in which even the voice of the engine seemed hesitant and more subdued, I began to feel as if I was making some awful intrusion--into what I did not know, but one felt the guilt of an appalling, defying presumption. And then I realized that we had been slowly descending through the clouds, for suddenly to the left I saw a patch of the purplish dream veil, and in a moment we were gliding down through the clouds and running just beneath them. Hals was shouting and pointing down. And I saw the battlefield. At first you thought of a cotton field, of white blown buds and then, as your vision shook off the spell of the bursting shells, you discerned down there a purplish, grayish patch of the earth, of which you were no longer a part, so remote, that only by peering down between your knees into the graflex-like observing glass set in the bottom of the car, could you distinguish even vaguely a single object in that colorous haze of distance. And then gradually there took shape in the glass, as in a crystal ball, accented lines and dabs of color, and there grew before you the black, zigzagging scars of the trenches--although you knew them to be brown with wet clay--and behind them more black lines, only straighter--and you guessed those to be reserve pits--and behind them, approaching at right angles, more black lines, only fewer and further apart--and these you judged the approach trenches. As you stared with the glass your eye never ranged the whole battle line, always the white puffing smoke obscured the view in tiny, white, swift-dispelling clouds, that rose from the area between the zigzagging lines. You wondered which were the French and which were the German trenches. Now a white spot suddenly appeared, exactly upon one of the black lines, and in fancy you heard the explosion of a shell and the groans of men, and you wondered if observers had seen officers coming up and if that shell had been particularly well aimed. A patch of earth, purplish gray in that hastening dusk, and illimitable lines of black stretching away, puffing white smoke quickly coming, quickly going; that was the battlefield as I saw it below the clouds.