d the low-lying clouds of smoke, and
beyond a huddle of broken houses far away was the town of Haisnes. Fosse
8 and the Hohenzollern redoubt were hummocks of earth faintly visible
through drifting clouds of thick, sluggish vapor.

On the edge of this battleground the fields were tawny under the golden
light of the autumn sun, and the broken towers of village churches, red
roofs shattered by shell-fire, trees stripped bare of all leaves before
the wind of autumn touched them, were painted in clear outlines against
the gray-blue of the sky.

Our guns had been invisible. Not one of all those batteries which were
massed over a wide stretch of country could be located before the battle
by a searching glass. But when the bombardment began it seemed as though
our shells came from every field and village for miles back, behind the
lines.

The glitter of those bursting shells stabbed through the smoke of
their explosion with little, twinkling flashes, like the sparkle of
innumerable mirrors heliographing messages of death. There was one
incessant roar rising and falling in waves of prodigious sound.
The whole line of battle was in a grayish murk, which obscured all
landmarks, so that even the Tower Bridge was but faintly visible.

Presently, when our artillery lifted, there were new clouds rising from
the ground and spreading upward in a great dense curtain of a fleecy
texture. They came from our smoke-shells, which were to mask our
infantry attack. Through them and beyond them rolled another wave of
cloud, a thinner, whiter vapor, which clung to the ground and then
curled forward to the enemy's lines.

"That's our gas!" said a voice on one of the slag heaps, amid a group of
observers--English and French officers.

"And the wind is dead right for it," said another voice. "The Germans
will get a taste of it this time!"

Then there was silence, and some of those observers held their breath as
though that gas had caught their own throats and choked them a little.
They tried to pierce through that bar of cloud to see the drama behind
its curtain--men caught in those fumes, the terror-stricken flight
before its advance, the sudden cry of the enemy trapped in their
dugouts. Imagination leaped out, through invisibility, to the
realization of the things that were happening beyond.

From our place of observation there were brief glimpses of the human
element in this scene of impersonal powers and secret forces. Across
a stretch