The sky tone was neutral. The chief features in the landscape were lent precision by the coming dawn. At our feet pearl-grey meadows sloped gently down to a highway bordered with trees, which might be followed northwards for miles, running in a straight line between two rounded hills. On the left there was a bizarre eminence, abrupt and bald; on the right two steeples, one of which rose at a short distance away behind a stretch of colourless heath. A mist hung about, dimming the surfaces and blurring the outlines. Another gloomy day in the making. "See anything, Bouillon?" "Never a Bosche!" he declared. Our glance probed each particle of ground. There was nothing suspicious, in the plain, or on the roads, which looked like huge ribbons. The enemy appeared to have melted away. Our field of view increased, the shadows were dispersing, and the horizon seemed to recoil. Still nothing to be seen. "They must 'ave 'ad a scare." Our mission was apparently at an end. It was up to the aeroplanes to take observations of the enemy's new positions. One of the war-birds happened to be flying over yonder at that moment, but we were undeceived when it approached, and we recognised a Taube. "Let's be getting back!" "Say, Sergeant, the country's not so dusty!" Touched and curious, did we foresee the miracle with which daybreak was to endow us? Here was the luminous veil of the aërial vault above us being rent and scattered. Shreds of the more transparent vapours still floated in the air, but the depths had ceased to look so uniformly dust-coloured. It was not long before cracks and then fissures and then chasms were hollowed in the clouds, and the liquid blue shone out between them bathed in a diaphanous radiance. The true sky smiled at last. The fleecy clouds dispersed and vanished, a few of them lingered in the form of scarfs, so attenuated that they looked like modest nebulas. The scintillation of the stars pierced through them. They would only shine for a moment and then pale in the growing daylight, but it was enough that they had reminded the mortals, saddened by the opaque and misty night, of their existence.