ell fire, and
disappeared, and Night dropped her curtain on the field with no one
knowing what morning would reveal.

The troops were in position; all was ready; all the lessons learned from
the attack of July 1st were to be applied. At midnight there was no
movement except of artillery caissons; gunners whose pieces two hours
later were to speak with a fury of blasts were sound asleep beside their
ammunition. The absolute order in this amazing network of all kinds of
supplies and transport contributed to the suspense. Night bombardments
we had already seen, and I would not dwell on this except that it had
the same splendor by night that the storming of Contalmaison had by day.

The artillery observer for a fifteen-inch gun was a good-humored host.
He was putting his "bit," as the British say, into Bazentin-le-Petit
village and the only way we knew where Bazentin was in the darkness was
through great flashes of light which announced the bursting of a
fifteen-hundred-pound shell that had gone hurtling through the air with
its hoarse, ponderous scream. All the slope up to the Ridge was merged
in the blanket of night. Out of it came the regular flashes of guns for
a while as the prelude to the unloosing of the tornado before the
attack.

Now that we saw them all firing, for the first time we had some idea of
the number that had been advanced into the conquered territory since
July 1st. The ruins and the sticks of trees of Fricourt and Mametz with
their few remaining walls stood out spectral in the flashes of batteries
that had found nesting places among the debris. The whole slope had
become a volcanic uproar. One might as well have tried to count the
number of fireflies over a swamp as the flashes. The limitation of
reckoning had been reached. Guns ahead of us and around us and behind us
as usual, in a battle of competitive crashes among themselves, and near
by we saw the figures of the gunners outlined in instants of weird
lightning glow, which might include the horses of a caisson in a flicker
of distinct silhouette flashed out of the night and then lost in the
night, with the riders sitting as straight as if at drill. Every voice
had one message, "This for the Ridge!" which was crowned by hell's
tempest of shell-bursts to prepare the way for the rush by the infantry
at "zero."

The thing was majestic, diabolical, beautiful, absurd--anything you
wished to call it. Look away from the near-by guns where the faces of