e or asking the neighbors to throw any bombs
over the fence in order to make the change gradual."

XXIX

THE HARVEST OF VILLAGES

High and low visibilities--Low Visibility a pro-German--High
Visibility and his harvest smile--Thirty villages taken by the
British--The 25th of September--The Road of the Entente--Twelve miles
of artillery fire--Two villages taken--Combles--British and French
meet in a captured village--English stubbornness--Dugouts holding a
thousand men--Capture of Thiepval.

Always we were talking of the two visibilities, high and low. I thought
of them as brothers with the same meteorological parent, one a good and
the other an evil genius. Every morning we looked out of doors to see
which had the stage. Thus, we might know whether or not the "zero" of an
attack set for to-day would be postponed, as it was usually if the sun
gave no sign of appearing, though not always; sometimes the staff gave
those who tried to guess what was in its mind a surprise.

Low Visibility, a pro-German who was in his element in the Ypres salient
in midwinter, delighted in rain, mist, fog and thick summer
haze--anything that prevented observers from seeing the burst of shells,
transformed shell-craters into miniature lakes and fields into mire to
founder charges, and stalled guns.

High Visibility was as merry as his wicked brother was dour. He sent the
sunlight streaming into your room in the morning, washed the air of
particles enabling observers to see shell-bursts at long range, and
favored successful charges under accurate curtains of fire--the patron
saint of all modern artillery work, who would be most at home in Arizona
where you could carry on an offensive the year around.

During September his was a glad harvest smile which revealed figures on
the chalk welts a mile away as clearly as if within a stone's throw
under the glasses and limned the tree-trunks of ruined villages in sharp
outlines. He was your companion now when you might walk up the Ridge
and, standing among shell-craters still as a frozen sea where but lately
an inferno had raged, look out across the fields toward new lines of
shell fire and newly won villages on lower levels. He helped to make the
month of September when he was most needed the most successful month of
the offensive, with its second great attack on the 25th turning the
table of losses entirely against the Germans and bringing many guests to
the prisoners'