It was a fine, clear day, and some of the French miners
living round the pit-heads on our side of the battle line climbed up
iron ladders and coal heaps, roused to a new interest in the spectacle
of war which had become a monotonous and familiar thing in their
lives, because the intensity of our gun-fire and the volumes of smoke-
clouds, and a certain strange, whitish vapor which was wafted from our
lines toward the enemy stirred their imagination, dulled by the daily
din of guns, to a sense of something beyond the usual flight of shells
in their part of the war zone.
"The English are attacking again!" was the message which brought out
these men still living among ruined cottages on the edge of the
slaughter-fields. They stared into the mist, where, beyond the
brightness of the autumn sun, men were about to fight and die. It was
the same scene that I had watched when I went up to the Loos redoubt
in the September battle--a flat, bare, black plain, crisscrossed with
the whitish earth of the trenches rising a little toward Loos and then
falling again so that in the village there only the Tower Bridge was
visible, with its steel girders glinting, high over the horizon line.
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