paradoxical motions too laboriously complex to describe, that always come when you are approaching the firing line and the novelty has not worn off. Growing heavier with the sound, until it became almost the slow roll of huge drums, the sky filled itself with the echoes of the guns, crashing and crashing as though the heavens were a vault of blue steel. And always, out of that growing grumble towards which we rode, we heard more distinctly the explosions of the shells, each in a separate disconcerting violence, and always louder, nearer. Two Uhlans, their mortar board helmets covered with cloth, galloped by; we overtook a transport train, the light, springy wagons moving easily through the mud, the drivers posting in their stirrups, which somehow seemed like an exhibition of beautiful riding that should have been done in a park. We turned out, our wheels spinning in mud up to the hubs, to let one of the big gray motor ambulances painted with huge red crosses, rumble by, with its red load for the field hospital in Commines. We passed two rosy-cheeked peasant girls, who carried food in baskets, and then the clank and jangle of a string of caissons, going at a canter, as though a battery needed shells. Perhaps the very battery we sought. Somewhere on that road we must have crossed the Belgian frontier, for after passing through silent, shelled Maraid we drove into Houthem, Commando of the Second Bavarian Corps. We had been following a road that ran parallel to the firing line only a mile on our left. Shells from the German batteries had been flying overhead, but the muffler cut-out had drowned their wicked whine. We were in Houthem, and across the muddy fields there was that row of trenches where the German line seems to come to a point, and where there was a colonel of whom we had heard in Commines, Oberst Meyer of the Seventeenth Bavarians, who had pushed forward as far as he dared go, lest he be enfiladed, was waiting now for his supports to come up--hence the point that you may have seen on your newspaper maps of January of the lines near Ypres.