We come to a halt near the Amblonville Farm, whose spacious and strongly-built walls look down over wide and rolling grass-lands, moist and verdant. The Mouilly Road terminates there: it stretches away before us, crossing a stream over a little stone bridge, passes a silver-surfaced lake, which acts as a mirror to the superb trees about it, to become winding and narrow near some sombre woods, amid which a half-hidden windmill arises, and finally scales the abrupt heights behind which lies the village. Behind the summit some 75's are firing steadily and slowly. Lower down, guns, horses and their drivers, and ammunition wagons, appearing as though sighted through the wrong end of a telescope, flow almost imperceptibly this way and that, like weeds slowly waving in the depths of a river. We make a fire, and soon potatoes begin to glaze and blacken among the glowing cinders. As a matter of sheer habit we eat them, defying such inconveniences as dyspepsia or enteritis or dysentery, from one or the other of which almost all of us have suffered for a month past. German aeroplanes come circling above us in the course of the afternoon. Our shells hurtle towards them like gigantic rockets minus their tail of sparks. Puffs of smoke, shot through for an instant by a golden glow, follow the aircraft, describing drifting circles about them, white as driven snow. They continue their flight, however, wheeling through space like birds of prey, watching always. A few bombs are dropped, burying themselves in the earth about us. One of them explodes violently, rather uncomfortably close at hand. The cyclist, who was lying down, jumped hastily to his feet and examined his foot. "Not a scratch!" he exclaimed. "It only cut open my shoe!" Down into the grass where he had been dozing he sank again, waving his hand towards the whistling shells: "You up there! Let us have no more of your impertinence." Having carefully arranged his handkerchief over his face, to shield his eyes from the sun, he continued to grumble under cover of it: "A good pair of bath-pumps gone for nothing! I have a good mind to give up marching altogether!" An hour later a few smoke-wreathed whizz-bangs pass over the top of the hill and fall alongside our batteries. One or two burst directly above the medley of traffic in the roadway, causing the microscopical horses (as they appeared to us), to rear and kick, and sending men, who looked to be no more than big insects, running this way and that; finally the whole concourse, like a long-drawn ribbon, moves away to vanish beneath the trees to the left. The guns remain in position. The sunset this evening over the valley is limpid and indescribably beautiful. The sky pales to the zenith as the sinking sun glides from transparent emerald to its bed of many golds, which deepen to the crimson of leaping flames on the skyline. _Thursday, September 24th._