DREADFUL SCENES OF WAR.

The dreadful scene of war closes in upon us, and draws nearer to places not long ago outside its zone, engulfing dear towns and villages in which our soldiers lived behind the lines familiar among the people, Merville, with its Flemish gables and old inns, and houses, and dainty shops, is now shelled to a ruin, and its streets are littered with dead. Into stately old Bailleul, with its bell-shaped tower and its great market square and solid old houses, built for the merchant princes of the sixteenth century, the enemy is flinging enormous shells, and yesterday, when I went that way to villages around, all the storm of battle was centred there, and there was a dreadful sweep of fire bearing down on Merriss close by, and down the road for miles came the people of Bailleul streaming away from that city in which their homes were being smashed by high explosives.

I have told how the day before yesterday, in the sunlight of a golden day of spring, with all nature singing over the fields, I saw the fires of war burning and high columns of smoke rising from Flemish villages. That night the scene of war became infernal up in Flanders. It was a clear, starlight night, and for miles the horizon was lit by the flame of burning farms and stores and ammunition dumps, and all this pale sky was filled with the wild glare of fires and by the flash of guns. German air-raiders came out dropping bombs. The sound of their engines was a droning song overhead, and our shrapnel winked and flashed about them. Flights of our aeroplanes went out over their positions, and the night was noisy with their explosions as they dropped tons of bombs over the German troops. To the people living in the villages of Flanders from which one can see the whole sweep of the battle-line, that night was full of terror, and from their windows they watched the burning of places from which they had escaped.