ying road, with complaints and heavy curses which the effort
strangles in our throats. After about a hundred yards, the two men of
each team exchange loads, so that after two hundred yards, in spite of
the bitter blenching breeze of early morning, all but the non-coms. are
running with sweat.

Suddenly a vivid star expands down yonder in the uncertain direction
that we are taking--a rocket. Widely it lights a part of the sky with
its milky nimbus, blots out the stars, and then falls gracefully,
fairy-like.

There is a swift light opposite us over there; a flash and a
detonation. It is a shell! By the flat reflection that the explosion
instantaneously spreads over the lower sky we see a ridge clearly
outlined in front of us from east to west, perhaps half a mile away.

That ridge is ours--so much of it as we can see from here and up to the
top of it, where our troops are. On the other slope, a hundred yards
from our first line, is the first German line. The shell fell on the
summit, in our lines; it is the others who are firing. Another shell
another and yet another plant trees of faintly violet light on the top
of the rise, and each of them dully illumines the whole of the horizon.

Soon there is a sparkling of brilliant stars and a sudden jungle of
fiery plumes on the hill; and a fairy mirage of blue and white hangs
lightly before our eyes in the full gulf of night.

Those among us who must devote the whole buttressed power of their arms
and legs to prevent their greasy loads from sliding off their backs and
to prevent themselves from sliding to the ground, these neither see nor
hear anything. The others, sniffing and shivering with cold, wiping
their noses with limp and sodden handkerchiefs, watch and remark,
cursing the obstacles in the way with fragments of profanity. "It's
like watching fireworks," they say.

And to complete the illusion of a great operatic scene, fairy-like but
sinister, before which our bent and black party crawls and splashes,
behold a red star, and then a green; then a sheaf of red fire, very
much tardier. In our ranks, as the available half of our pairs of eyes
watch the display, we cannot help murmuring in idle tones of popular
admiration, "Ah, a red one!"--"Look, a green one!" It is the Germans
who are sending up signals, and our men as well who are asking for
artillery support.

Our road turns and climbs again as the day at last decides to appear.
Everything looks dirty. A layer of