"What was that lieutenant so excited about?" I asked, as we left the bombproof. "Why, his observer just telephoned that the French and their aeroplanes were ascending." Even as I climbed up the canal bank, I saw the young artillerymen reluctantly covering their guns with branches, until, through a distant field glass, they would seem to be bushes. Their battery was "strategically silenced." I saw the under officers scampering down into the bombproof and their guns transformed into big gray leafless bushes, the boyish soldiers ran into hiding behind the blackened brick wall of a shelled house. Boo-oom! Boo-oom! Over in the village the smoke was pouring from a burning house and above the treetops the shrapnel spread their fleecy clouds. In the next field I saw a patch of blackened smoke; dirt flew. "Run!" shouted the Bavarian Captain, who had been in America. "Run like hell." And as we tore pell mell past the ruined house, the artillerymen grinned and waved their hands. "_Gute Reise!_" one of them yelled. Pleasant journey! VI A NIGHT BEFORE YPRES The following are expanded pages of the diary that I kept from five o'clock in the evening of January 10th, 1915, to seven o'clock the next morning. 5 P. M.: The motor has stopped, but I wonder why. In Houthem the Bavarian captain told us that we were going to Brigade Headquarters. I can see though only a dirty brick farmhouse; its door is open and the light of a lamp falling on the yard seems to float in a yellow watery pool. But the other gray-green army car has stopped too, and Hauptmann Kliewer is getting out. So we pile out on the muddy road just as Hauptmann Kliewer beckons us to come on. Behind us the ruined walls of Houthem are hiding in the thickening dusk, but the grayish steeple where the Germans have--and the French used to have--their observers, persistently shows itself.