the gunners were illumined and you could not conceive of the scene as
being of human origin; but mixing awed humility with colossal egoism in
varying compounds of imagination and fact, you might think of your
little group of observers as occupying a point of view in space where
one planet hidden in darkness was throwing aerolites at another hidden
in darkness striking it with mighty explosions, and the crashes and
screams were the sound of the missiles on their unlighted way.

It was still dark when three-thirty came and pyrotechnics were added to
the display, which I could not think of as being in any sense
pyrotechnical, when out of the blanket as signals from the planet's
surface in the direction of some new manoeuver appeared showers of
glowing red sparks, which rose to a height of a hundred feet with a
breadth of thirty or forty feet, it seemed at that distance. One shower
was in the neighborhood of Ovillers, one at La Boisselle and one this
side of Longueval. Then in the distance beyond Longueval the sky was
illumined by a great conflagration not on the fireworks program, which
must have been a German ammunition dump exploded by British shells.

It was our planet, now, and a particular portion of it in Picardy. No
imaginative translation to space could hold any longer. With the charge
going in, the intimate human element was supreme. The thought of those
advancing waves of men in the darkness made the fiery display a
dissociated objective spectacle. On the Ridge more signal flares rose
and those illumining the dark masses of foliage must be Bazentin Wood
gained, and those beyond must be in the Bazentin villages, Little
Bazentin and Big Bazentin, though neither of them, like most of the
villages, numbering a dozen to fifty houses could be much smaller and be
called villages.

This was all the objective. Yes, but though the British had arrived, as
the signals showed, could they remain? It seemed almost too good to be
true. And that hateful Trones Wood? Had we taken that, too, as a part of
the tidal wave of a broad attack instead of trying to take it piecemeal?

Our suspense was intensified by the thought that this action might be
the turning-point in the first stage of the great Somme battle. We
strained our eyes into the darkness studying, as a mariner studies the
sky, the signs with which we had grown familiar as indicative of
results. There was a good augury in the comparatively slight German
shell fire in res