ted by both sides above their
trenches on each side of the salient. The balls of light rose into the
velvety darkness and a moment later suffused the sky with a white glare
which faded away tremulously after half a minute.

Against the first vivid brightness of it the lines of trees along the
roads to Hooge were silhouetted as black as ink, and the fields between
Ypres and the trenches were flooded with a milky luminance. The whole
shape of the salient was revealed to us in those flashes. We could
see all those places for which our soldiers fought and died. We stared
across the fields beyond the Menin road toward the Hooge crater, and
those trenches which were battered to pieces but not abandoned in the
first battle of Ypres and the second battle.

That salient was, even then, in 1915, a graveyard of British
soldiers--there were years to follow when many more would lie there--and
as between flash and flash the scene was revealed, I seemed to see a
great army of ghosts, the spirits of all those boys who had died on this
ground. It was the darkness, and the tumult of guns, and our loneliness
here on the ramparts, which put an edge to my nerves and made me see
unnatural things.

No wonder a sentry was startled when he saw our two figures approaching
him through a clump of trees. His words rang out like pistol-shots.

"Halt! Who goes there?"

"Friends!" we shouted, seeing the gleam of light on a shaking bayonet.

"Come close to be recognized!" he said, and his voice was harsh.

We went close, and I for one was afraid. Young sentries sometimes shot
too soon.

"Who are you?" he asked, in a more natural voice, and when we explained
he laughed gruffly. "I never saw two strangers pass this way before!"

He was an old soldier, "back to the army again," with Kitchener's men.
He had been in the Chitral campaign and South Africa--"Little wars
compared to this," as he said. A fine, simple man, and although a
bricklayer's laborer in private life, with a knowledge of the right
word. I was struck when he said that the German flares were more
"luminous" than ours. I could hardly see his face in the darkness,
except when he struck a match once, but his figure was black against the
illumined sky, and I watched the motion of his arm as he pointed to the
roads up which his comrades had gone to the support of another battalion
at Hooge, who were hard pressed. "They went along under a lot of
shrapnel and had many casualties."

He t