which makes the climax of manoeuvres look so great a game. But in a
little while that general creeping forward was checked: there were
orders coming from the umpires, and a sort of lull fell over each
position held. My companion said to me:

"Let us go forward now over the intervening zone and in among Picquart's
men, and get well behind their line, and see whether there is a rally or
whether before the end of this day they begin to fall back again."

So we did, walking a mile or so until we had long passed their outposts
and were behind their forward lines. And standing there, upon a little
eminence near a wood, we turned and looked over what we had come,
westward towards the sun which was now not far from its setting. Then it
was that we saw the last of the Great Sight.

The level light, mellow and already reddening, illumined all that plain
strangely, and with the absolute stillness of the air contrasted the
opening of the guns which had been brought up to support the renewal of
the attack. We saw the isolated woods standing up like islands with low
steep cliffs, dotted in a sea of stubble for miles and miles, and first
from the cover of one and then from another the advance perpetually,
piercing and deploying. As we so watched there buzzed high above us,
like a great hornet, a biplane, circling well within our lines, beyond
attack from the advance, but overlooking all they concealed behind it.
In a few minutes a great Bleriot monoplane like a hawk followed, yet
further inwards. The two great birds shot round in an arc, parallel to
the firing line, and well behind it, and in a few minutes, that seemed
seconds, they were dots to the south and then lost in the air. And
perpetually, as the sun declined, Picquart's men were falling back north
and south of us and before us, and the advance continued. Group by group