The scene of the battle in those early hours was a great and terrible picture. It will be etched as long as life lasts in the minds of men who saw it. The ruins of Ypres were vague and blurred in the mist as I passed them on the way up, but as moment passed moment the jagged stump of the Cloth Hall, and the wild wreckage of the asylum, and the fretted outline of all this chaos of masonry which was so fair a city once, leapt out in light which flashed redly and passed. So it was all along the way to the old German lines. Bits of villages still stand, enough to show that buildings were there, and where isolated ruins of barns and farmhouses lie in heaps of timber and brickwork about great piles of greenish sand-bags and battered earthworks. Through shell-holes in fragments of walls red light stabbed like a flame, and out of the darkness of the mist they shone for a second with an unearthly brightness. It was the light of our gun-fire. Our guns were everywhere in the low concealing mist, so that one could not walk anywhere to avoid the blast of their fire. They made a fury of fire. Flashes leapt from them with only the pause of a second or two while they were reloaded. There was never a moment within my own range of vision when hundreds of great guns were not firing together. They were eating up shells which I had seen going up to them, and the roads and fields across which I walked were littered with shells. The wet mist was like one great damp fire, with ten miles or more of smoke rising in a white vapour, through which the tongues of flames leapt up, stirred by some fierce wind. The noise was terrifying in its violence. Passing one of those big-bellied howitzers was to me an agony. It rose like a beast stretching out its neck, and there came from it a roar which clouted one's ear-drums and shook one's body with a long tremor of concussion. These things were all firing at the hardest pace, and the earth was shaken with their blasts of fire. The enemy was answering back. His shells came whining and howling through all this greater noise, and burst with a crash on either side of mule tracks and over bits of ruin near by, and in the fields on each side of the paths down which German prisoners came staggering with their wounded. Fresh shell-holes, enormously deep and thickly grouped, showed that he had plastered this ground fiercely, but now, later in the morning, his shelling eased off, and his guns had other work to do over there where our infantry was advancing. Other work, unless the guns lay smashed, with their teams lying dead around them, killed by our counter-battery work with high explosives and gas; for in the night we smothered them with gas and tried to keep them quiet for this battle and all others.