kite-balloons rose in clusters to spy out the first news of the coming battle. The cocks of Flanders crowed, and two heavy German shells roared over Kemmel Hill and burst somewhere in our lines. A third came, but before its explosion could be heard, all the noise there had been, all these separate sounds of guns and high explosives and shrapnel were swept up into the tornado of artillery which now began. The signal for its beginning was the most terribly beautiful thing, the most diabolical splendour, I have seen in war. Out of the dark ridges of Messines and Wytschaete and that ill-famed Hill 60, for which many of our best have died, there gushed out and up enormous volumes of scarlet flame from the exploding mines and of earth and smoke, all lighted by the flame, spilling over into fountains of fierce colour, so that all the countryside was illumined by red light. Where some of us stood watching, aghast and spellbound by this burning horror, the ground trembled and surged violently to and fro. Truly the earth quaked. A New Zealand boy who came back wounded spoke to me about his own sensations. "I felt like being in an open boat on a rough sea. It rocked up and down this way and that." Thousands of British soldiers were rocked like that before they scrambled up and went forward to the German lines--forward beneath that tornado of shells which crashed over the enemy's ground with a wild prolonged tumult just as day broke, with crimson feathers unfolding in the eastern sky, and flights of airmen following other flights above our heroes. Rockets rose from the German lines--distress signals flung up by men who still lived in that fire zone--white and red and green. They were calling to their gunners, warning them that the British were upon them. Their high lamps were burning as lost hopes in God or man, and then falling low and burning out. Presently there were no more of them, but others which were ours in places which had been German. Smoke drifted across and mingled with the morning mist. One could see nothing but a bank of fog thrust through with short stars of light. The first definite news that I had was from German prisoners, who came down in batches, carrying our wounded when any help was needed for our own stretcher-bearers. They described how our men came close behind the barrage, some of them, by a kind of miracle, in advance of the barrage. The Germans had not expected the attack for another two days, and last night were endeavouring to relieve some of their exhausted troops by new divisions, the 3rd Bavarians relieving the 24th Saxons, and the 104th Infantry Reserve the 23rd Bavarians. They lost heavily on the way up to the lines by our fire, and were then, after a few hours, attacked by our waves of infantry.