The rain had ceased, the smell of death was in the air. The ground seemed soaked with men who had died. Mingled with this smell was the sickly sweetness of gas and the suffocating fumes of explosives. The blanket of mist which had made us safe, was breaking up and drifting away in little ghostly clouds. It was the hour when the gunners on either side of No-Man’s-Land stand down on their harassing fire and wait breathlessly for the S. O. S. which betokens an attack. When that comes, they open up at an intense rate of fire, four rounds per gun per minute. To be caught in such a hail-storm of destruction is not pleasant, and especially unpleasant when you know that you are serving no good purpose by your presence. We gazed behind us at the Gentelles Woods; the shells had ceased to burst and all was quiet. “Let’s make our get-away while the going is good,” Strong said. Crouching and running low along the ground, we scrambled through the orchard and plunged into the wheat-field. In order that we might reconnoitre a new route of approach to the positions, we struck off to the left, entering a ravine which led down to a lower road which paralleled the shell-torn highway along the ridge. From a distance the ravine looked wild and forsaken; not a plume of smoke rose; nothing stirred. As we walked down it, we discovered that what we had mistaken for rocks and patches of brush, were actually carefully camouflaged ammunition-dumps and battery positions. Not only this ravine, but every hill and slope was stiff with guns of every calibre, lying masked and silent, waiting for the great hour to strike when they would blow the Hun out of his strongholds. In rabbit-warrens dug far down beneath the surface, the French artillery-men bided their time. Some of them peeped out to watch us pass, with eyes uninterested and fatalistic. Our idea of the scope of the attack which was planned grew as we investigated further. We also began to get a picture of what these preparations had already cost in lives. Horses and men lay strewn about in every stage of decomposition. Some had only been dead for hours; others were the skeletons of those who had fallen in the fierce counter-drive, which had halted the Huns’ rush towards Amiens. One wondered how that rush had ever been halted and, when it had been halted, how the line had been held. Every bit of high ground in our hands was over-topped by a higher point in the hands of the enemy. From all directions on the eastern horizon, from woods and coppices in a great semi-circle, the Hun gazed down; it was impossible to avoid his eyes. Every now and then a scurry of bullets or a whizz-bang bursting near us would remind us of this fact, and we would flatten ourselves.