The meteorologist of the Second Army was
often a gloomy prophet, and his prophecies were right. How it rained
on nights when hundreds of thousands of British soldiers were waiting
in their trenches to attack in a murky dawn!. . . We said good night
to General Harington, each one of us, I think, excited by the thought
of the drama of human life and death which we had heard in advance in
that glass house on the hill; to be played out by flesh and blood
before many hours had passed. A kind of sickness took possession of my
soul when I stumbled down the rock path from those headquarters in
pitch darkness, over slabs of stones designed by a casino architect to
break one's neck, with the rain dribbling down one's collar, and, far
away, watery lights in the sky, of gun-flashes and ammunition-dumps
afire, and the noise of artillery thudding in dull, crumbling shocks.
We were starting early to see the opening of the battle and its
backwash. There would be more streams of bloody, muddy men, more
crowds of miserable prisoners, more dead bodies lying in the muck of
captured ground, more shells plunging into the wet earth and throwing
up columns of smoke and mud, more dead horses, disemboweled, and
another victory at fearful cost, over one of the Flanders ridges.
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