en carpets, with the cloud shadows passing over them and moving like
battalions up the gracious slopes of the downs beyond. A gleam of white in
the midst of one of the brown fields caught the eye. It seemed like a patch
of snow that had survived the rigours of the English summer, but suddenly
it rose as if blown by the wind and came towards us in tiny flakes of white
that turned to seagulls. They sailed high above us uttering that querulous
cry that seems to have in it all the unsatisfied hunger of the sea.

In this splendid spaciousness the familiar forms seem incredibly
diminutive. That little speck moving across one of the brown carpets is a
ploughman and his team. That white stream that looks like milk flowing over
the green carpet is a flock of sheep running before the sheep-dog to
another pasture. And the ear no less than the eye learns to translate the
faint suggestions into known terms. At first it seems that, save for the
larks that spring up here and there with their cascades of song, the whole
of this immense vacancy is soundless. But listen. There is "the wind on the
heath, brother." And below that, and only audible when you have attuned
your ear to the silence, is the low murmur of the sea.

You begin to grow interested in probing the secrecies of this great
stillness. That? Ah, that was the rumble of some distant railway train
going to Brighton or Eastbourne. But what was that? Through the voices of
the wind and the sea that we have learned to distinguish we catch another
sound, curiously hollow and infinitely remote, not vaguely pervasive like
the murmur of the sea, but round and precise like the beating of a drum
somewhere on the confines of the earth.

"The guns!"

Yes, the guns. Across fifty miles of sea and fifty miles of land the sound
is borne to us as we sit in the midst of this great peace of earth and sky.
When once detached, as it were, from the vague murmurs of the breathing air
it becomes curiously insistent. It throbs on the ear almost like the
beating of a pulse--baleful, sepulchral, like the strokes of doom. We begin
counting them, wondering whether they are the guns of the enemy or our own,
speculating as to the course of the battle.

We have become spectators of the great tragedy, and the throb of the guns
touches the scene with new suggestions. Those cloud shadows drifting across
the valley and up the slopes of the downs on the other side take on the
shapes of massed battalions. The a