ere was more than half a gale blowing on the eve of the new year,
and the wind came howling with a savage violence across the rain-swept
fields, so that the first day of a fateful year had a stormy birth, and
there was no peace on earth.

Louder than the wind was the greeting of the guns to another year of
war. I heard the New-Year's chorus when I went to see the last of the
year across the battlefields. Our guns did not let it die in silence.
It went into the tomb of the past, with all its tragic memories,
to thunderous salvos, carrying death with them. The "heavies" were
indulging in a special strafe this New--Year's eve. As I went down a
road near the lines by Loos I saw, from concealed positions, the flash
of gun upon gun. The air was swept by an incessant rush of shells, and
the roar of all this artillery stupefied one's sense of sound. All about
me in the village of Annequin, through which I walked, there was no
other sound, no noise of human life. There were no New-Year's eve
rejoicings among those rows of miners' cottages on the edge of the
battlefield. Half those little red-brick houses were blown to pieces,
and when here and there through a cracked window-pane I saw a woman's
white face peering out upon me as I passed I felt as though I had seen a
ghost-face in some black pit of hell.

For it was hellish, this place wrecked by high explosives and always
under the fire of German guns. That any human being should be there
passed all belief. From a shell-hole in a high wall I looked across the
field of battle, where many of our best had died. The Tower Bridge of
Loos stood grim and gaunt above the sterile fields. Through the rain
and the mist loomed the long black ridge of Notre Dame de Lorette, where
many poor bodies lay in the rotting leaves. The ruins of Haisnes and
Hulluch were jagged against the sky-line. And here, on New--Year's eve,
I saw no sign of human life and heard no sound of it, but stared at the
broad desolation and listened to the enormous clangor of great guns.

* * *

Coming back that day through Bethune I met some very human life. It was
a big party of bluejackets from the Grand Fleet, who had come to see
what "Tommy" was doing in the war. They went into the trenches and saw
a good deal, because the Germans made a bombing raid in that sector and
the naval men did their little bit by the side of the lads in khaki,
who liked this visit. They discovered the bomb store and opened such a
Brock's