points with powerful artillery as their support.

Sunday night was a veritable pandemonium of destruction and tumult.
All night long, without cessation, the batteries of both sides,
knowing exactly their opponents' range, fired perpetually. All
night long searchlight bombs were thrown. All night long, golden
and red and yellow streams of flame or the sudden jagged flash
of an explosion lit up the black smoke of burning buildings and
fields in the valley, or showed the white puff-like low clouds of
the bursting shrapnel. Not for an instant did the roar diminish,
not for a second was the kindly veil of night left unrent by a
fissure of vengeful flame. Yet, all night long, as ceaselessly
as the great guns poured out their angry fury, so did men pour
out their indomitable will, and in that hell light of battle flame
engineers labored to construct bridges, small bodies of troops
moved forward to join their comrades in the trenches who had been
able to make a footing the day before, and all night long, those
ghastly yet merciful accompaniments of a battle field--the ambulance
corps--carried on their work of relief. The searchlights swept up
and down the valley, like great eyes that watched to give direction
to the venom of war.

At three o'clock in the morning of Monday, September 14, 1914,
two regiments were sent to capture a sugar factory strongly held
by the enemy. That sugar factory became a maelstrom. Three more
regiments had to be brought up and finally the guards, and even
thus heavily overpowered, the Germans successfully defended it
until noon. They sold their lives dearly--those defenders. That
sugar factory stood on that Monday as did Hogoumont at Waterloo. It
delayed the advance of the entire First Corps, but at four o'clock
in the afternoon, Sir Douglas Haig ordered a general advance. The
last afternoon and evening scored a distinct success for the English
arms, and when at last it grew absolutely too dark to see, that
corps held a position stretching from Troton to La Cour de Soupir.
Its chief importance, however, was that it gave the Allies a strongly
intrenched position on the plateau itself.

It was of this day's fighting that, almost a month later, Sir John
French was able to say in his official dispatches:

"The action of the First Corps on this day under the direction and
command of Sir Douglas Haig was of so skillful, bold, and decisive
a character that he gained positions which alone have enabled me