As a result, I witnessed the most brilliant scene of battle of any on the Somme, unless it was the taking of Combles. There was bright sunshine, with the air luminously clear and no heat waves. From my vantage point I could see clear to the neighborhood of Peronne. The French also were attacking; the drumhead fire of their _soixante-quinze_ made a continuous roll, and the puffs of shrapnel smoke hung in a long, gossamery cloud fringing the horizon and the canopy of the green ridges. Every aeroplane of the Allies seemed to be aloft, each one distinct against the blue with shimmering wings and the soft, burnished aureole of the propellers. They were flying at all heights. Some seemed almost motionless two or three miles above the earth, while others shot up from their aerodromes. Planes circling, planes climbing, planes slipping down aerial toboggan slides with propellers still, planes going as straight as crows toward the German line to be lost to sight in space while others developed out of space as swift messengers bound for home with news of observations, planes touring a sector of the front, swooping low over a corps headquarters to drop a message and returning to their duty; planes of all types, from the monsters with vast stretch of wing and crews of three or more men, stately as swans, to those gulls, the saucy little Nieuports, shooting up and down and turning with incredible swiftness, their tails in the air; planes and planes in a fantastic aerial minuet, flitting around the great sausage balloons stationary in the still air. With ripening grain and sweet-smelling harvests of clover and hay in the background and weeds and wild grass in the foreground, the area of vegetation in the opulence of midsummer was demarked from the area of shell-craters, trenches and explosions. You had the majesty of battle and the desolation of war; nature's eternal seeding and fruiting alongside the most ruthless forms of destruction. In the clear air the black bursts of the German high explosives hammering Mametz Wood, as if in revenge for its loss, seemed uglier and more murderous than usual; the light smoke of shrapnel had a softer, more lingering quality; soldiers were visible distinctly at a great distance in their comings and goings; the water carts carrying water up to the first line were a kind of pilgrim circuit riders of that thirsty world of deadly strife; a file of infantry winding up the slope at regular intervals were silhouettes as like as beads on a string. The whole suggested a hill of ants which had turned their habits of industry against an invader of their homes in the earth, and the columns of motor trucks and caissons ever flowing from all directions were as a tide, which halted at the foot of the slope and then flowed back.