that was to hide a thousand gallant deeds, the winding-sheet that was to enwrap so many a hero. Modern war holds no dramatic spectacles to enchant the brush of a Meisonnier, no drama is wrought upon a lime-lit stage to arrest the pulses of the watching nations. Yet none the less is its fascination omnipotent; its magnetic attraction, that draws into its vortex every man that owns a soul to plague him, is none the less irresistible; its influence still has the power to weld a chain of heroes out of a dirty, blasphemous, footsore crowd of sinners. War tends to the uplifting of the race, not to its debasement, let him who has faced it deny it if he can! At 6.30 a.m. the infantry left their trenches and, so far as we were concerned, vanished into the smoke. All we could see were the columns scaling the ladders and starting to double across the open. Some seemed to trip as they ran, and fell in various attitudes from which they did not trouble to rise. At first we thought that our wire had not been thoroughly cut, and that these men had fallen over some unseen strands. But the red pools that slowly surrounded each soon undeceived us, the while that the roar of rifle-fire from the enemy's side grew ever more menacing. We could not see what success attended those who went on, but we heard subsequently that practically no resistance was encountered on the enemy's first and second line, but that the third line was very strongly held and considerably delayed, in some sectors permanently arrested, our advance. The battery and the O.P. were equally desirable as far as vision went, the battery being blind by nature and the O.P. by science. It has, incidentally, yet to be proved that the hindrance to the enemy caused by the use of smoke is not more than counterbalanced by the paralysing of the initiative of one's own artillery, who are entirely dependent, when this method of warfare is employed, upon time-tables and such messages as the advancing infantry may be able to send back. However, that is not a question meet for discussion except in works devoted to the abstruse study of strategy and tactics. Let us return to the passage of events in the battery.