sses like the scales of some huge
magpie-moth, while a long streamer of petrol smoke made faint
pencillings in the sky behind it. As it hovered above the ridge seven or
eight little white clouds like balls of feathers suddenly appeared from
nowhere just below it. They were German shrapnel. But the aeroplane
passed imperturbably on, leaving the little feathers to float in the sky
until in time they faded away and disappeared. In no long time the
aeroplane was retracing its flight, and certain little coloured discs
were speaking luminously to the battery, telling it of what the observer
had seen beyond the ridge. Between the aeroplane, the observer, the
telephone, and the guns, there seemed to be some mysterious freemasonry.
And this impression of secret and collusive agencies was heightened by
the vibration of the air above us, in which the shells from the
batteries made furrows that were audible without being visible, as
though the whole firmament were populated with disembodied spirits. The
passivity of the toilers in the field below us, who, absorbed in their
husbandry, regarded not the air above them, and the dreaming beauty of
the distant city almost persuaded us that we were the victims of a
gigantic illusion. But even as we gazed the city acquired a desperate
and tragic reality. Voices of thunder awoke behind the ridge, the air
was rent like a garment, and first one cloud and then another and
another rose above the city of Ypres, till the white towers were blotted
out of sight. A black pall floated over the doomed city, and from that
moment the air was never still, as a rhythm of German shells rained upon
it. The storm spread until other villages were involved, and a fierce
red glow appeared above the roofs of Vlamertinge.

Yet the clouds and flame that rose above the white towers had at that
distance a flagrant beauty of their own, and it was hard to believe that
they stood for death, desolation, and the agony of men. Beyond the
voluminous smoke and darting tongues of fire, our field-glasses could
show us nothing. But we knew--for we had seen but yesterday--that behind
that haze there was being perpetrated a destruction as mournful and
capricious as that which in the vision upon the Mount of Olives overtook
Jerusalem. Where two were in the street one was even now being taken and
the other left; he who was upon the housetop would not come down to take
anything out of his house, neither would he who was in the field