oad came German prisoners, marching rapidly between mounted
guards. Many of them were wounded, and all of them had a wild, famished,
terror-stricken look.

At a turn in the road the battle lay before us, and we were in the zone
of fire. Away across the fields was a line of villages with the town of
Dixmude a little to the right of us, perhaps a mile and a quarter away.
From each little town smoke was rising in separate columns which met at
the top in a great black pall. At every moment this blackness was
brightened by puffs of electric blue, extraordinarily vivid, as shells
burst in the air. From the mass of houses in each town came jets of
flame, following explosions which sounded with terrific thudding shocks.
On a line of about nine miles there was an incessant cannonade. The
farthest villages were already on fire.

Quite close to us, only about half a mile across the fields to the left,
there were Belgian batteries at work and rifle fire from many trenches.
We were between two fires, and Belgian and German shells came screeching
over our heads. The German shells were dropping quite close to us,
plowing up the fields with great pits. We could hear them burst and
scatter and could see them burrow.

[Illustration: ADMIRAL SIR JOHN JELLICOE
Commanding the British Fleets
(_Photo from Rogers._)]

[Illustration: GEN. VICTOR DANKL
The Austrian Commander in the Russian Campaign
(_Photo from Bain News Service._)]

In front of us on the road lay a dreadful barrier, which brought us to a
halt. A German shell had fallen right on top of an ammunition convoy.
Four horses had been blown to pieces and their carcasses lay strewn
across the road. The ammunition wagon had been broken into fragments and
smashed and burned to cinders by the explosion of its own shells. A
Belgian soldier lay dead, cut in half by a great fragment of steel.
Further along the road were two other dead horses in pools of blood. It
was a horrible and sickening sight, from which one turned away
shuddering with cold sweat, but we had to pass it after some of this
dead flesh had been dragged away.

Further down the road we had left two of the cars in charge of Lady
Dorothie Feilding and her two nurses. They were to wait there until we
brought back some of the wounded. Two ambulances came on with our light
car, commanded by Lieut. Broqueville and Dr. Munro. Mr. Gleeson asked me
to help him as stretcher-bearer. Mr. Ashmead-Bartlett was to work with
one of t