Through the haze which lies low over Flanders, though above there is still a blue sky, the noise of great gun-fire goes on, rising and falling in gusts, and, like the beat of surf to people who live by the sea, it is the constant sound in men's ears, not disturbing their work unless they are close enough to suffer from the power behind the thunder-strokes. The trees are yellowing into crinkled gold, and there is the touch and smell of autumn in the night air, and the orchards of France are heavy with fruit. Wonderful weather, the soldiers say. The artillery battle is endless, and on both sides is intense and widespread. It was followed yesterday by five German counter-attacks, which did not reach our lines. In a very desperate way the enemy is trying to push us back from positions which are essential to the strength of his defence. All his guns are at work. Is it the last phase of the war? Does the enemy know that he must win or lose all? Our men have that hope in their hearts, and fight more grimly and with higher spirit because of it. The success of the last two battles has deepened the hope, and men come back from the line, back to the rest-billets, with the old conviction newly revived that at last they have the enemy down and under and very near hopelessness. In the rest-billets are the men who come back. They come marching back along the dusty roads from the fire-swept zone, first across ground pitted with new-made shell-holes, with the howl of shells overhead, and then through broken villages on the edge of the battlefields, and then through standing villages where only a gap or two shows where a haphazard shell has gone, and then at last to the clean, sweet country which no high explosives reach, unless a hostile airman comes over with his bombs. In any old billet in Flanders one hears the tale of battle told by men who were there, and it is worth while, as yesterday, when I sat down at table with the officers of a battalion of Suffolks in a Flemish farmhouse. The men were camped outside, and as I passed I liked the look of these lads, who had just come out of one of the stiffest fights of the war. They looked amazingly fresh after one night's rest, and they stood in groups telling their yarns in the good old dialect of their county, laughing as though it had all been a joke, though it was more than a joke with death on the prowl. "Your men look fit," I said to the colonel of the Suffolks, and he smiled as though he liked my words, and said, "You couldn't get their tails down with a crowbar. It was a good show, and that makes all the difference. They have been telling the Australian boys that you have only got to make a face at the Hun and he puts his hands up. They knocked the stuffing out of the enemy."