Somewhere behind that ridge were the enemy’s batteries and they were yet to find.  But even as we searched the landscape with our field-glasses an aeroplane rose from behind our own position and made for the distant ridge, its diaphanous wings displaying red, white, and blue concentric circles to our glasses 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 return to take away his clothes.  The great cathedral was crumbling to dust, and saints, apostles, prophets, martyrs were being hurled from their niches of stone, the Virgin alone standing unscathed upon her pedestal contemplating