Anyhow, we bumped and blundered on until dawn came, streaked with wonderful rolling mist, and gave a glimpse at intervals of a wide plain sloping toward the west, with long lines of infantry and here and there guns extended across it in parallels drawn north and south.

The rifle firing started ten minutes after dawn, and it was all over in less than half an hour; but I can’t describe exactly how the finish came, because the wind was toward us and the morning mist blew along in blanketing white masses that only allowed you a momentary glimpse and then shut off the view.

We were about a mile behind the firing-line and I couldn’t see Feisul’s car or any of the others.  For the moment there was just one clear line of vision, straight from where I sat to the nearest infantry.  I could see about fifty yards of the line and perhaps that many men; and they were blazing away furiously over a low earthwork, although I couldn’t see a sign of the French.  There was hardly any artillery firing at that time.

Suddenly without any obvious reason the men whose backs I was watching broke and ran.  The mist obscured them instantly and the line of vision shifted, so that bit by bit I saw I dare say a mile of the firing line.  The whole lot were running for their lives and, look where I would, there wasn’t a sign of a Frenchman anywhere.

I should say it took about ten minutes for the first of them to reach the dirt road, where our autos stood hub-deep in mud, and by that time we had shoved and pulley-hauled them into movement, our engines making as much row as a nest of machine-guns as they struggled against the strain.  We didn’t want to be swamped under that tide of fugitives.

But they took no notice of us.  They had thrown away their weapons and were running for home with eyes distended and nothing in mind but to put distance between there and the enemy.  I jumped out of the car and seized one man.

“What are you running from?  What has happened?” I demanded, holding him harder the more he struggled.

“Poison gas!” he gasped, and I let him go.

I thought I caught a whiff of the darned stuff then, but that may have been imagination.

“Poison gas!” I said, returning to the car, and Rene made a fine exhibition of himself, smothering his head under the foxlined overcoat and screaming.

He got right down on the floor of the car and lay there huddled and gasping—­which may have been a sensible precaution; I don’t know.  There was no time just then to bother with him.

The flukey morning breeze shifted several points.  The mist curled suddenly and began to flow diagonally across our line of cars instead of toward us, and from one moment to the next you could see straight along the road for maybe a mile or more.  There was a sight worth seeing—­ Feisul’s cavalry in full rout—­running away from ghosts by the look of it—­their formation hardly yet broken, horse and man racing with the wind and a scattering of unhorsed fugitives streaming behind like a comet’s tail.