It is so unutterably strange to find all this life, this vast preparation and organization, going forward in the open country where, but a twelvemonth back, the peasants were gathering the harvest, to know that it was going forward before you came, and will go forward after you have left. With such feelings of bewilderment, I fancy, must the traveller, in the early days of gold-mining, have come upon the mining-camps that sprang up in a day in the midst of barren wastes, and stood, in incredulous amazement, watching the ceaseless activity of a great host of humans returned to the era of the troglodyte. Neither by day nor by night are the trenches restful. Seldom a day or a night goes by without the “whoosh” of a shell or the clumsy rush of a trench-mortar bomb. The hollow reports of the rifles never cease. Scarcely an afternoon passes, should the weather not be misty, but the firmament quakes with the rapid reverberations of the anti-aircraft guns. “Pom-pom-pom-pom-pom” is their note, sharp and unmistakable, as they throw circles of snow-white smoke-puffs about the aeroplanes soaring high in the sky. The firing-line by night is restless as a storm-tossed sea. One dark and starless night in June I climbed a commanding height which afforded a wonderful view of a great part of our line. A thin crescent of yellow moon hung low on the skyline. A cold east wind rustled through the trees. Far below me in the plain a never-ceasing spout of brilliant green-white star-shells marked the winding course of the British and German lines. It was an unforgettable picture. For one brief moment a desolate ridge, broken with the jagged silhouette of ruined houses, stood out hard and clear before my eyes, and then was blotted out as a flare fell earthward and died. The ragged outline of a shattered belfry was revealed for a fraction of time, black and sinister as a Doré glimpse of Hell, and then melted away into the surrounding darkness. The soft soughing of the wind in the trees was mingled with an incessant dull thrumming from the plain. Now it rose in a swelling burst of sound, from the right, from the left, from the centre, of the darkness at my feet; now it died away into single blows that echoed noisily in their isolation. Sometimes the spout of star-shells ran dry, and for a minute or two all the plain lay swathed in its pall of darkness. Then silently, swiftly, a flare would wing its way aloft, and once more unbare the plain of death to view. Guns boomed now and then from the distance. Along the blurred line of the horizon fitful bursts of light blazed up and died, like lightning in a summer sky. Sometimes the blaze was orange, sometimes yellow, and the air throbbed to the ear.