Shall we climb this tree for a better view? Up there we shall see marvellously. We grope our way upwards. The wind, which has risen and now blows strongly, rocks the great tree and us with it in the darkness. It is delightful. Think of all the brave fellows who climb up here at all times of the day and night, to sit for hours in constant peril of their lives! A stimulating thought!
And what a fine seat for the fireworks! One doesn't miss a thing. See that blue light! And the red fire on the right! What's that glow—look!—over there?
"An eighteen-inch," says somebody. He means that they have just fired one of the great eighteen-inch guns. It is, of course, an English gun.
We continue our journey through the night, coming ever nearer to the firing line. Our guide knows every smallest path of this section like the palm of his hand—better, indeed, than his own London streets.
Here, lately, he got his first wound. There—where that anti-aircraft gun is lurking—he saw his best friend fall. And this place is not safe even yet. All round us the guns, great and small, sing their chorus to the night. Was not that short thud, a moment ago, a 75? Odd, how things get mixed up nowadays! A 75 with the English! Hullo, there! Can you tell us what that was just now?
And now we are amazed to see an immense light which, how I cannot tell, has suddenly flooded the whole sky with a red glare. Our guide, who has passed months on end in the trenches, tells us that he has never before seen this appearance. It seems like an Aurora borealis, pierced to the zenith by a perpendicular ray, like an L, of a still fiercer red. And now upon this weirdly-lit background rise thick spirals of vapour. And the picture is miles long. Mysterious, deadly beauty, that the bursting of the shrapnel seems to applaud!
There is no mystery. A squadron of German war planes has crossed the first lines in the darkness and dropped incendiary bombs where it has supposed a store of munitions to be. The perpendicular beam—a stripe upon that red cloth—is the ray of a searchlight, probing the dark sky. This Aurora borealis—this Northern Dawn—is the work of man, and will soon be put to flight by the dawn of the coming day.
"And what's that, Major?" one of us asks, pointing to a star.
"One of the good God's aeroplanes," says the Englishman.