It is my duty to write the facts of it, and to give the picture of it. That is not easy to a man who, after seeing the bombardments of many battles, has seen just now the appalling vision of massed gun-fire enormously greater in intensity than any of those, whose eyes are still dazed by a sky full of blinding lights and flames, and who has felt the tremor of earthquakes shaking the hill-sides, when suddenly, as a signal, the ground opened and mountains of fire rose into the clouds. There are no words which will help the imagination here. Neither by colour nor language nor sound could mortal man reproduce the picture and the terror and the tumult of this scene. Our troops are now fighting forward through smoke and mist--English regiments, New-Zealanders, Protestant and Catholic Irishmen. Their Divisions from north to south were the 23rd, 47th (London), 41st, 19th, 16th (Irish), 36th (Ulster), 25th, New Zealand, and 3rd Australian. They are fighting shoulder to shoulder in an invisible world, from which they are sending up light signals to show the progress they have made to the eyes of men flying high above the storm of battle, and to watchers in the country from which they went just as the faint rays of dawn flushed a moonlight sky. They have made good progress up the slopes of Wytschaete and Messines. Prisoners are already coming back with tales of how our men swept over them and beyond. So far it seems that the day goes well for us, but it is early in the day, and I must write later of what happens later on that ridge hidden behind the drifting clouds of smoke. [Illustration: LINE BEFORE THE BATTLE OF MESSINES]