SURPRISES OF A MOONLIT FROSTY NIGHT.

A true Walpurgis Night of heroes and warriors. It is not on the summit of the Brocken that I have witnessed it, but, looking out over the plain of the Ancre, from a tree. This tree, every evening, is wreathed with the fumes of asphyxiating shells. Its woolly streamers of shrapnel smoke are like the foliage around a heraldic crown.

As soon as twilight is come, aeroplanes cross the neighbouring lines and attack this tree with their machine-guns. It is treated like a combatant. Herein, perhaps, lies the secret of its clumsy strength and beauty. It stands upon its hill, solid and straight. It holds its ground as few men could do. It is a French ash that stands upon the field of battle in the very middle of the British Army.

It has become an observation post. One climbs it by a straight ladder 160 feet long. In its highest fork one of the engineers has made a wooden box, bound together with barbed wire, with a little canvas to hide it. Field-glasses, maps, range-finders are there. All the gusts of the autumnal breeze blow through it. Up here, too, men are pitched about as if they were in the mizzen-top of a cruiser. Strange nest for war eagles!

"Perfect weather for flying," the major tells me.

A clear, frosty, moonlight night broods over the black distances of the plain. The river and its swampy edges glisten like silver coins. No sign of life. Only the guns, all round the horizon, roar beneath their crests of lightning.

Imagine that after blinding yourself with a very tight and thick bandage you suddenly open your eyes. Glowing discs, will o' the wisps, haloes, flashing rainbows, a whole ballet of lights spins upon your retina. Up here, that is the spectacle that each night brings. The battlefield appears to be electrified. At one moment, sharp, stabbing flashes, cold arrows of light. It is the English guns shelling the enemy. The next, radiances which divide, spread out fanwise, or blossom like flowers. They are German marmites or crapouillots.

The sounds of the guns intersect one another. They are hard and dry, when some battery, near by, opens fire; dull, soft and muffled, according as the distance becomes greater. A stroke upon a gong, followed by a long metallic shriek, high in the air, announces a heavy shell. After a hoarse scream a machine-gun begins to crackle, rending both air and men.

It is all one vast intermittent hurly-burly, lightning flashing low down, V-shaped sheaves of red fire. And all is, each time, unexpected, cruelly inconsequent, magnificent and devastating.

Thousands of men are there, and thousands upon thousands, all over this plain of the Ancre. There they lie, buried in their trenches, their nerves like stretched wire, ready to spring forward on the instant.

From here we can see one of the last sectors to be conquered.

It is land over which the offensive has passed.

And our hearts ache as we remember that down there, near this swamp, it is not even in ill-made trenches that the English sections are keeping their watch, but, simply, in shell-holes, where the water lies deep, holes whose sides have been hastily shored up—veritable human hells.

The fireworks did not keep us waiting. About ten o'clock, a certain unwonted nervousness becoming evident among the Germans, the two English trenches of the first line let off a bouquet of rockets. Balls of light, red, blue or green, climbed 90 feet into the air. For a moment they rose, hesitatingly, like toy balloons at the end of a string, then burst into stars or sheaves, lighting up, as with a ghastly daylight, this neutral ground, this "no man's land," which the scattered corpses of the patrols alone inhabit. After each flight of rockets the guns came savagely to life, and, below our watch-tower, even in greater numbers, even more furious, other batteries, and yet others, proclaimed their presence. "Barrage!" one of the short-lived fire-balls demanded over to the west. The firing increased, pounding the sector from end to end. This light from fairyland, then, was nothing but a cry for help! In a moment the Ancre and its swamps were blushing.

The moon began to veil herself with small round clouds. "Watch out for the aeroplanes," our staff-major told us again. In a quarter of an hour his warning was justified.

The snarl of engines filled the milky spaces of the sky. Two squadrons against two. The English searchlights found the enemy for a moment, then lost him. Then from every crest and from smallest hollow the anti-aircraft guns began their barrage. In the sky nothing could be seen but the commas of flame and blazing curves, which marked where the shrapnel and the shells had burst. The machine-guns chattered like an applauding crowd.

A few planes succeeded in crossing the barrage. It was magic—of another kind.

One, two, five incendiary bombs were thrown by the enemy. The eye was dazzled as by a sudden appearance of the aurora-borealis. The night became a ghastly day. Thick columns of smoke rose into the air, then, half-way to the clouds, swelled up like the tops of palm-trees. And thus they remained, twenty minutes after the explosion, without dissolving, steady against the wind, turning themselves into canopies and domes and a preposterous hedge of giant parasols.

One might have thought that some fabulous forest had just sprung up, filled with domed palaces of fantastic shape.

A night very fruitful of surprises—barrages, rockets, anti-aircraft firing, a battle of aeroplanes, incendiary bombs. Truly the Great Game, this!

I left my watch-tower tree like a man who has saved his soul from the black powers of sorcery.