There are fires burning on the hillsides. I saw their flames and their great, rolling clouds of smoke rise this morning from places where the day before I had seen French peasants plowing as though no war were near, and young girls scattering grain over the fields harrowed by their small brothers, and old women bending to the soil in the small farmsteads where all their life was centred, until suddenly the frightful truth touched them and they had to leave their homes. Sometimes today I wished to God the sun would not shine like this nor nature mock at me with its thrilling-beauty of life. However, the British are full of confidence. If they were forced back they are glad to know that they made the enemy pay heavy prices and that their line is still unbroken. They are full of faith that against all odds they shall hold their own in the last battle of all. Men Utterly Weary _Sunday, April 14._--The Commander in Chief's order of the day should reveal to the British people and to the world what is happening out here in France--the enemy's object to seize the Channel ports and destroy the British Army, and the frightful forces he has brought against it to achieve that plan, and the call that has come to the troops to hold every position to the last man. "Many among us now are tired. * * * With our back to the wall each one of us must fight to the end." Yes, the men are tired, so tired after weeks of fighting, after these last days and nights, that they can hardly stagger up to resist another attack, yet they do so because their spirit wakes again above their bodily fatigue; so tired that they go on fighting like sleep-walkers, and in any respite lie in ditches and under hedges and in open fields under fire in deep slumber until the shouts of their Sergeants stir them again. Some of these men have been fighting since March 21 with only a few days' rest. To people living in the villages of Flanders, from which one can see the whole sweep of the battleline, Friday night was full of terror, and from the windows they watched the burning of places from which they had escaped and the bonfires of their homes, and these refugees while sleeping with children at their breast wept. Yesterday it was a drama of noise, beating against one's ears and against one's heart, and it was a strange, terrible thing to stand there, blind, as it were, listening to the infernal tumult of gunfire south of Bailleul, with knockings and sledgehammer strokes, loud and shocking, above the incessant drumfire of field artillery. The German shells came howling over into fields and villages beyond Bailleul, bursting with gruff coughs, and there was an evil snarl of shrapnel in the mist. It was the noise of the greatest battle in history. Fall of Neuve Eglise