the distant hill crests just a vague blue screen against the sky.

There is one point on those hills where the two lines of trenches ought
to be clearly visible to us. With a good glass on a clear day you should
be able to distinguish anything as big as a man at that distance--much
more a line of men. Within less than an hour, at half-past seven, the
infantry will leave our trenches over twenty miles of front and launch a
great attack. The country town below us is Albert--behind the centre of
the British attack. One can see the tall, battered church tower rising
against the mist, with the gilt figure of the Virgin hanging at right
angles from the top like the arm of a bracket. On the hills beyond can
just be made out the woods of Fricourt behind the German line. They are
in the background behind Albert church tower. The white ruins of
Fricourt may be the blur in the background south of them. We shall be
attacking Fricourt to-day.

The Germans have not a single "sausage" in the air that I can see. The
sausage is the very descriptive name for the observation balloon. We
have twenty-one of them up, specking the sky as clearly as a
bacteriologist's slide is specked with microbes.

The Germans used to have a whole fleet of them looking down over us. But
a week ago our aeroplanes bombed all along the line, and eight of them,
more or less, went down in flames within a single afternoon.

7.10 a.m.--Six of our aeroplanes are flying over, very high, in a
wedge-shaped flight like that of birds. Single British aeroplanes have
been coming and going since the bombardment started. I have not seen any
German plane. The distant landscape is becoming fainter. The flashes of
our guns can be seen at intervals all over the slopes immediately below