le. But he could not pull the trigger of his gun with his left
hand. He tried it and failed. So at last he tied a stout cord to the
trigger, fastened the end of it to the door, and sitting on the bench
kicked the door to. They had just taken him away.

Just back of Ypres there is a group of buildings that had been a great
lunatic asylum. It is now a hospital for civilians, although it is
partially destroyed.

"During the evacuation of the town," said the Commandant, "it was
decided that the inmates must be taken out. The asylum had been hit
once and shells were falling in every direction. So the nuns dressed
their patients and started to march them back along the route to the
nearest town. Shells were falling all about them; the nuns tried to
hurry them, but as each shell fell or exploded close at hand the
lunatics cheered and clapped their hands. They could hardly get them
away at all; they wanted to stay and see the excitement."

That is a picture, if you like. It was a very large asylum, containing
hundreds of patients. The nuns could not hurry them. They stood in the
roads, faces upturned to the sky, where death was whining its shrill
cry overhead. When a shell dropped into the road, or into the familiar
fields about them, tearing great holes, flinging earth and rocks in
every direction, they cheered. They blocked the roads, so that gunners
with badly needed guns could not get by. And behind and all round them
the nuns urged them on in vain. Some of them were killed, I believe.
All about great holes in fields and road tell the story of the hell
that beat about them.

Here behind the town one sees fields of graves marked each with a
simple wooden cross. Here and there a soldier's cap has been nailed to
the cross.

The officers told me that in various places the French peasants had
placed the dead soldier's number and identifying data in a bottle and
placed it on the grave. But I did not see this myself.

Unlike American towns, there is no gradual approach to these cities of
Northern France; no straggling line of suburbs. Many of them were laid
out at a time when walled cities rose from the plain, and although the
walls are gone the tradition of compactness for protection still holds
good. So one moment we were riding through the shell-holed fields of
Northern France and the next we were in the city of Ypres.

At the time of my visit few civilians had seen the city of Ypres since
its destruction. I am not sure