Last night all was ready. Men knowing the risks of it all--for no plans are certain in war--had a sense of oppression, strained by poignant anxiety. Many men's lives were on the hazard of all this. The air was heavy, as though nature itself were full of tragedy. A summer fog was thick over Flanders, and the sky was livid. Forked lightning rent the low clouds, and thunder broke with menacing rumblings. Rain fell sharply, and on the conservatory of a big Flemish house where officers bent over their maps and plans the rain-drops beat noisily. But the storm passed and the night was calm and beautiful. Along the dark roads, and down the leafy lanes, columns of men were marching, and brass bands played them through the darkness. Guns and gun-limbers moved forward at a sharp pace. "Lights out" rang the challenges of the sentries to the staff cars passing beyond the last village where any gleam was allowed, and nearer to the lines masses of men lay sleeping or resting in the fields before getting orders to go forward into the battle zone. All through the night the sky was filled with vivid flashes of bursting shells and with steady hammer-strokes of guns, and from an observation-post looking across the shoulder of Kemmel Hill, straight to Wytschaete and the Messines Ridge, I watched this bombardment and waited for that moment when it should rise into a mad fury of gun-fire before our men lying in these dark fields should stumble forward. During those hours of waiting in the soft warm air of the night I thought of all I had heard of the position in front of us. "It's a Gibraltar," said an officer who was there in the early days of the war. "The enemy will fight his hardest for the Messines Ridge," said another officer, whose opinion has weight. "He has stacks of guns against us." Such thoughts made one shiver, though the night was warm, so warm and moist that wafts of scent came up from the earth and bushes. A full moon had risen, veiled by vapours until they drifted by and revealed all her pale light in a sky that was still faintly blue, with here and there a star. The moon through all her ages never looked down upon such fires of man-made hell as those which lashed out when the bombardment quickened. That was just before three o'clock. For two hours before that fires had been lighted in the German lines by British shell-fire--big rose-coloured smoke-clouds with hearts of flame--and all round the salient and the Messines Ridge our guns flashed redly as they fired, and their shell-bursts scattered light against which the trees were etched sharply. I could hear the rattle of gun-wagons along the distant roads, and the tuff-tuff of an engine driving very close up to the firing-lines, and above the great loudness of our gun-fire the savage whine of German shrapnel coming over in quick volleys. The drone of a night-flying aeroplane passed overhead. The sky lightened a little, and showed black smudges like ink-blots on blue silk cloth where our