As a pendant to what I saw from the Scherpenberg while heavy fighting
was going on in the salient, I may set forth how, a year later (that is,
in August, 1916), I and a friend climbed the steep path of yellow sand
which leads to the top of "Le Mont des Cats," a sister summit. From this
isolated sandhill, one sees the whole plain of Flanders laid out like a
green map at one's feet. But on this occasion, instead of seeing, as I
had seen from the Scherpenberg, the pomp and circumstance of war, the
view on that particular August afternoon from the Mont des Cats was
apparently one of perfect peace.
The opposing armies lay quiet in their trenches. Only the boom of an
occasional gun which the foe or the British were firing (cheerfully
rather than sullenly) and now and then the noise of an "Archie" warning
a Taube to "keep off the grass" in the vault of Heaven, destroyed the
illusion of profound rest and reminded one that the wide world was at
war. Otherwise the pacific fallacy was for the moment complete. In the
sober sunlight of the late summer afternoon the whole earth seemed
lapped in happy slumber.
Yet two hours after, and at the actual sunset, so quick are the changes
at the front, the present writer, by that time off the hill and in the
plain below, saw the heavens gloriously alive with the pageantry of
conflict.
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