The scene of war since Thursday, when our troops went away in the wet mist for the great battle up the slopes of the Passchendaele Ridge, has been dark and grim and overcast with a brooding sky, where storm-clouds are blown into wild and fantastic shapes. Yesterday over the country round Ypres, which still in its ruins holds the soul of all the monstrous tragedy hereabouts, white cloud-mountains were piled up against black, sullen peaks and were shot through with a greenish light, very ghastly in its revelation of the litter and the wreckage of the great arena of human slaughter. Etched sharply against this queer luminance were the lopped trunks of shell-slashed trees and bits of ruined buildings with tooth-like jags above heaps of fallen masonry. Rain fell heavily for most of the day, as nearly all the night, and as it rains to-day, and a wet fog rose from the ground where the shell-craters were already ponds brimming over into swamps of mud. Through the murk our guns fired incessantly, almost as intense as the drum-fire which precedes an attack, though there was no attack from our side or the enemy's, and it was a strange, uncanny thing to hear all that crashing of gun-fire and the wail of great shells in flight to the German lines through this midday darkness. I marvelled at the gunners, who have gone on so long--so long through the days and nights--feeding those monsters. The infantry have a hard time. It is they who fight with flesh and blood against the machinery of slaughter which is set against them. It is they who go out across the fields on that wild adventure into the unknown. But the gunners, standing by the heavies and the 18-pounders in the sodden fields, with piles of shells about them and great dumps near by, have no easy, pleasant time. On the morning of the last battle I saw the enemy's shells searching for them, flinging up the earth about their batteries, ploughing deep holes on either side of them. They worked in the close neighbourhood of death, and at any moment, between one round and another, a battery and its gun teams might be blown up by one of those howling beasts which seem to gather strength and ferocity at the end of their flight before the final roar of destruction. Now and again a lucky shell of the enemy's gets an ammunition dump, and a high torch rises to the dark sky, and in its flames there are wild explosions as the shells are touched off. But the gunners go on with their work in all the tumult of their own batteries, deafening and ear-splitting and nerve-destroying, and our young gunner officers, muddy, unshaven, unwashed, with sleep-drawn eyes, pace up and down the line of guns saying, "Are you ready, Number One?--Number One, fire!" with no sign of the strain that keeps them on the rack when a big battle is in progress. For them the battle lasts longer than for the infantry. It begins before the infantry advance, it lulls a little and then breaks out into new fury when the German counter-attacks begin.