the same hour should bring us to this magic stillness and peace and
within sight of the smoke of war and within sound of the guns.

At the next turn we heard them.

We still thought that we could get to Schoonard, to the burning factory,
and work back to Zele by a slight round. But at this turn we had lost
sight of Schoonard and the great cloud altogether, and found ourselves
in a little hamlet Heaven knows where. Only, straight ahead of us, as we
looked westwards, we heard the guns. The sound came from somewhere over
there and from two quarters; German guns booming away on the south,
Belgian [? French] guns answering from the north.

Judging by these sounds and those we heard afterwards, we must have been
now on the outer edge of a line of fire stretching west and east and
following the course of the Scheldt. The Germans were entrenched behind
the river.

In the little hamlet we asked our way of a peasant. As far as we could
make out from his mixed French and Flemish, he told us to turn back and
take the road we had left where it goes south to the village of
Baerlaere. This we did. We gathered that we could get a road through
Baerlaere to Schoonard. Failing Schoonard, our way to Zele lay through
Baerlaere in the opposite direction.

We set off along a very bad road to Baerlaere.

Coming into Baerlaere, we saw a house with a remarkable roof, a
steep-pitched roof of black and white tiles arranged in a sort of
chequer-board pattern. I asked Mr. L. if he had ever seen a roof like
that in his life and he replied promptly, "Yes; in China." And that
roof--if it was coming into Baerlaere that we saw it--is all that I can
remember of Baerlaere. There was, I suppose, the usual church with its
steeple where the streets forked and the usual town hall near it, with a
flight of steps before the door and a three-cornered classic pediment;
and the usual double line of flat-fronted, grey-shuttered houses; I do
seem to remember these things as if they had really been there, but you
couldn't see the bottom half of the houses for the troops that were
crowded in front of them, or the top half for the shells you tried to
see and didn't. They were sweeping high up over the roofs, making for
the entrenchments and the batteries beyond the village.

We had come bang into the middle of an artillery duel. It was going on
at a range of about a mile and a half, but all over our heads, so that
though we heard it with great intensity, we saw