mastery of the air, and to blind the enemy's eyes before this battle, and beyond any doubt successful as far as this day goes. The night-birds swooped over places where they thought our batteries were hidden and dropped bombs, but as they could see nothing their aim was bad, and they did no important damage, if any at all. So the hours of the night crept by, enormously long to all those men of ours waiting for the call to rise and go. Our gun-fire had never stopped for weeks in its steady slogging hammering, but shortly after half-past three this ordinary noise of artillery quickened and intensified to a monstrous and overwhelming tumult. It was so loud that twelve miles behind the lines big houses moved and were shaken with a great trembling. People farther away than that awakened with fear and went to their windows and stared out into the darkness, and saw wild fireballs in the sky, and knew that men were fighting and dying in Flanders in one of the great battles of the world. This morning I watched the fires of this battle from an observation-post on the edge of the salient. I knew what I should have seen if there had been any light, for I saw those places a day or two ago from the same spot. I should have seen the ghost-city of Ypres, and the curve of the salient round by Pilkem, St.-Julien, and Zillebeke, and then Warneton and Houthem below the Messines Ridge. But now there was no light, but hundreds of sharp red flashes out of deep gulfs of black smoke and black mist. The red flashes were from our forward batteries and heavy guns, and over all this battlefield, where hundreds of thousands of men were at death-grips, the heavy, smoke-laden vapours of battle and of morning fog swirled and writhed between clumps of trees and across the familiar places of death round Ypres, hiding everything and great masses of men. The drum-fire of the guns never slackened for hours. At nine o'clock in the morning it beat over the countryside with the same rafale of terror as it had started before four o'clock. Strangely above this hammering and thundering of two thousand guns or more of ours, answered by the enemy's barrage, railway whistles screamed from trains taking up more shells, and always more shells, to the very edge of the fighting-lines, and in between the massed batteries, using them as hard as they could be unloaded. Over at Warneton and Oostaverne, in the valley below the Messines Ridge, the enemy was pouring fire along our line, shells of the heaviest calibre, which burst monstrously, and raised great pillars of white smoke. It was a valley of death there, and our men were in it, and fighting for the slopes beyond.