The long, deep shadowed hall was packed with dim forms, their glimmering faces all upturned toward the pictures on the lighted screen. It was an intent audience, silent except for snatches of muttered comment, an occasional shuffle of heavy boots, and the creaking of equipment. Here and there, spotting the gloom vividly for a moment, a resolute face would be lit up in the fleeting flare of a match. The air was thick with the smell of cigarette smoke and wet leather.

The cinema-hall was in a side street of shell-shattered Albert. Outside, under the glassy, blue-white flooding of the November moon, the great falling statue of the Virgin and Child, arrested midway in its dizzy plunge from the top of the Cathedral tower, looked down upon the jumble of broken roofs and windowless walls, and on the ceaseless procession of ambulances, lorries, limbers and tramping battalions which thronged the Bapaume road.

The lower sky all round to the east and north was continually stabbed with jets of flame, so savagely intense that even the unclouded moonlight could not drown them. The windless air quivered and shrank under the shocks of our nearer guns—the 6-inch, the 9.2’s and the 11-inch high-nosing giants. It wailed or whined or whimpered to the soaring passage of the shells as they streamed outwards toward the German lines. Every now and then the fierce wailing in the sky, instead of dying off into the distance, drew nearer, rose into a venomous stream, and ended with a nerve-shattering crash which jarred Albert to her deep cellars; for the ruined town, being crowded with troops, was the object of ceaseless attention from the German batteries along the yet unconquered heights of the Ancre.  In the pauses of the bombardment would be heard, now and again, the waspish drone of an aeroplane questing and quartering the sky far overhead.

But to all these outer sounds and befallings the packed spectators in the cinema-hall gave not a thought. They were engrossed in the moving pictures which passed before them on the screen. And what were the pictures that could so rivet their attention while swift death roared and screamed all about them? They were scenes of an earlier portion of the tremendous conflict going on even now just beyond their walls. For the film was the great battle-film of the fighting on the Somme.

It was all theirs. The naked rises swept with shell-bursts, the fire-scourged roads leading straight into the hell of the locked struggle, the cratered and tortured rolling fields, the ghastly pale patches of wreckage which had been La Boiselle, Ovillers, Contalmaison, the half-obliterated white lines of the trenches for the capture of which the best blood of the Empire had been so lavishly and so splendidly outpoured—all this they knew to every hallowed acre of it. They had marched over it, endured over it, many of them fought over it.