Hours passed, bringing the usual changes of sounds in battles. The piece that had started so rapidly on the piano slowed down; the notes spaced themselves out; the first continuous barking of many guns slackened off irregularly into isolated barks and groups of barks--just what you hear from a dog whose temper is subsiding, with occasional returns. That, in itself, told nothing. Troops might only have gained a few hundred yards in the old Flanders way, and then flopped down to dig and be murdered. Or--but one kept a tight hand on hope. One had hoped too often since Loos. And then the mist lifted. It rolled right up into the sky in one piece, like a theatre curtain, almost suddenly taking its white quilted thickness away from between our eyes and the vision so much longed for during four years. Beyond the river a miracle--_the_ miracle--had begun. It was going on fast. Remember that all previous advances had gained us little more than freedom to skulk up communication trenches a mile or two further eastward, if that. But now! Across the level Santerre, which the sun was beginning to fill with a mist-filtered lustre, two endless columns of British guns, wagons, and troops were marching steadily east, unshelled, over the ground that the Germans had held until dawn. Nothing like it had ever been seen in the war. Above, on our cliff, we turned and stared at each other. We must have looked rather like Cortes' men agape on their peak. The marvel seemed real; the road lay open and dry across the Red Sea. Far off, six thousand yards off in the shining south-east, tanks and cavalry were at work, shifting and gleaming and looking huge on the sky-line of some little rumpled fold of the Santerre plateau. Nearer, the glass could make out an enemy battery, captured complete, caught with the leather caps still on the muzzles of guns. The British dead on the plain, horses and men, lay scattered thinly over wide spaces; scarcely a foundered tank could be seen; the ground had turf on it still; it was only speckled with shell-holes, not disembowelled or flayed. The war had put on a sort of benignity, coming out gallantly on the top of the earth and moving about in the air and the sun; the warm heath, with so few dead upon it, looked almost clement and kind, almost gay after the scabrous mud wastes and the stink of the captured dug-outs of the Salient, piled up to ground-level with corpses, some feet uppermost, some heads, like fish in a basket, making you think what wonderful numbers there are of mankind. For a moment, the object of all dream and desire seemed to have come; the flaming sword was gone, and the gate of the garden open.