We now ought to be able to see, from where we sit with our telescopes, the bursts of our shells on those distant ridges.  But I cannot swear that I see a single one.  The sound of the bombarding is like the sound of some titanic iron tank which a giant has set rolling rapidly down an endless hill.  We can hear the soft whine of scores of shells hurrying all together through the air.  Every five minutes or so a certain howitzer, tucked into some hiding-place, vents its periodical growl, and we can hear the huge projectile climbing slowly, up his steep gradient with a hiss like that of water from a fire-hose.  There is some other heavy shell which passes us also, somewhere in the middle of his flight.  We cannot distinguish the report of the gun, and we do not hear the shell burst; but at regular intervals we can quite distinctly hear the monster making his way leisurely across our front.

We can distinguish in the uproar the occasional distant crash of a heavy shell-burst.  But not one burst can I see.  The sun upon the mist makes the distant hill crests just a vague blue screen against the sky.

There is one point on those hills where the two lines of trenches ought to be clearly visible to us.  With a good glass on a clear day you should be able to distinguish anything as big as a man at that distance—­much more a line of men.  Within less than an hour, at half-past seven, the infantry will leave our trenches over twenty miles of front and launch a great attack.  The country town below us is Albert—­behind the centre of the British attack.  One can see the tall, battered church tower rising against the mist, with the gilt figure of the Virgin hanging at right angles from the top like the arm of a bracket.  On the hills beyond can just be made out the woods of Fricourt behind the German line.  They are in the background behind Albert church tower.  The white ruins of Fricourt may be the blur in the background south of them.  We shall be attacking Fricourt to-day.

The Germans have not a single “sausage” in the air that I can see.  The sausage is the very descriptive name for the observation balloon.  We have twenty-one of them up, specking the sky as clearly as a bacteriologist’s slide is specked with microbes.

The Germans used to have a whole fleet of them looking down over us.  But a week ago our aeroplanes bombed all along the line, and eight of them, more or less, went down in flames within a single afternoon.

7.10 a.m.—­Six of our aeroplanes are flying over, very high, in a wedge-shaped flight like that of birds.  Single British aeroplanes have been coming and going since the bombardment started.  I have not seen any German plane.  The distant landscape is becoming fainter.  The flashes of our guns can be seen at intervals all over the slopes immediately below us, and their blast is clearly shown by the film of smoke and dust which hurries into the air.  The haze makes a complete screen between us and the battle.