The fireworks did not keep us waiting. About ten o'clock, a certain unwonted nervousness becoming evident among the Germans, the two English trenches of the first line let off a bouquet of rockets. Balls of light, red, blue or green, climbed 90 feet into the air. For a moment they rose, hesitatingly, like toy balloons at the end of a string, then burst into stars or sheaves, lighting up, as with a ghastly daylight, this neutral ground, this "no man's land," which the scattered corpses of the patrols alone inhabit. After each flight of rockets the guns came savagely to life, and, below our watch-tower, even in greater numbers, even more furious, other batteries, and yet others, proclaimed their presence. "Barrage!" one of the short-lived fire-balls demanded over to the west. The firing increased, pounding the sector from end to end. This light from fairyland, then, was nothing but a cry for help! In a moment the Ancre and its swamps were blushing. The moon began to veil herself with small round clouds. "Watch out for the aeroplanes," our staff-major told us again. In a quarter of an hour his warning was justified. The snarl of engines filled the milky spaces of the sky. Two squadrons against two. The English searchlights found the enemy for a moment, then lost him. Then from every crest and from smallest hollow the anti-aircraft guns began their barrage. In the sky nothing could be seen but the commas of flame and blazing curves, which marked where the shrapnel and the shells had burst. The machine-guns chattered like an applauding crowd. A few planes succeeded in crossing the barrage. It was magic--of another kind. One, two, five incendiary bombs were thrown by the enemy. The eye was dazzled as by a sudden appearance of the aurora-borealis. The night became a ghastly day. Thick columns of smoke rose into the air, then, half-way to the clouds, swelled up like the tops of palm-trees. And thus they remained, twenty minutes after the explosion, without dissolving, steady against the wind, turning themselves into canopies and domes and a preposterous hedge of giant parasols. One might have thought that some fabulous forest had just sprung up, filled with domed palaces of fantastic shape. A night very fruitful of surprises--barrages, rockets, anti-aircraft firing, a battle of aeroplanes, incendiary bombs. Truly the Great Game, this! I left my watch-tower tree like a man who has saved his soul from the black powers of sorcery. CHAPTER V. THE BATTLE REOPENS. 18th November. The Battle of the Ancre, which for a moment had died down, began again this morning, at dawn, with a new violence. The English had only paused just long enough to oil the vast machine, which has now resumed its regular, methodic movements; and the latest news permits us to anticipate a fresh and substantial success.