lines among the cornfields all gold and glowing in the evening light, with a little shadow sleeping beside each stook; and it blew the evening retreat. It is the first time I have heard a bugle play that call so near to the guns, and it stirred one's heart with a queer sense of emotion, as though its music belonged to the spirit world. The night closed down on the battlefields but did not bring peace. Below the stars there were many strange lights and fires and sounds. A tall bank of clouds was pierced with lightning so like shell-fire, except for a longer tremor of light, that men looked and wondered what devilry was on over there in the back areas. The devilry was round about. It was time for the German raiders to come out under the cover of darkness, and they came and dropped their bombs over quiet villages and among the cornfields and the hop-gardens. The explosions came up with sharp flashes and gruff roars from dark fields between black belts of trees. From the earth hands of light stretched up, reaching up to the clouds and touching them with their finger-tips. They felt their way for those flying raiders, groped about like hands searching in a dark room, and then clasped each other. In the archway below their long straight arms shrapnel glinted like confetti. Our anti-aircraft guns had got their target. Along the lines rockets were rising, giving a second or two of white steady light to No Man's Land, with fringes of trees etched blackly against it. Somewhere a dump--ours or the enemy's--had been hit, and the clouds above it were tipped with scarlet flame. So then the night scene began as usual, and as it is played out below the stars every night. And somewhere in Lens the Prussians were preparing for a new counter-attack, while German doctors in deep tunnels stared down upon a mass of wounded which was their day's harvest. Into one of the houses there the night before, where fifteen German soldiers lay in the cellar after a day of prodigious fighting, a party of Canadian raiders appeared and dragged them all out to a ditch over the way in the Canadian lines. Well may the German prisoners say to these men of ours, "You give us no rest." There is never a night's rest in Lens nor round about it unless men are put to sleep for ever. Many of them were put to sleep by thousands of gas-shells fired into the town by our artillery a night ago as an answer to German gas. Perhaps they were glad of it, for the wakeful hours in Lens must be hell on earth. * * * * * AUGUST 24