from men who asked me to write to their
relatives. Breakfast had just been set on the table when I heard the
loudest bang I have ever heard in my life. A seventeen inch shell had
fallen in the corner of the garden where the sentry had been standing.
The windows of the house were blown in, the ceiling came down and soot
from the chimneys was scattered over everything. I suddenly found
myself, still in a sitting posture, some feet beyond the chair in
which I had been resting. Mr. Vandervyver ran downstairs and out into
the street with his toilet so disarranged that he looked as if he were
going to take a swim. Murdoch MacDonald disappeared and I did not see
him again for several days. A poor old woman in the street had been
hit in the head and was being taken off by a neighbour and a man was
lying in the road with a broken leg. All my papers were unfortunately
lost in the debris of the ceiling. I went upstairs and got a few more
of my remaining treasures and came back to the dining room. There I
scraped away the dust and found two boiled eggs. I got some biscuits
from the sideboard and went and filled my water-bottle with tea in the
damaged kitchen. I was just starting out of the door when another
shell hit the building on the opposite side of the street. It had been
used as a billet by some of our men. The sentry I had been talking to
had disappeared and all they could find of him were his boots with his
feet in them. In the building opposite, we found a Highlander badly
wounded and I got stretcher-bearers to come and carry him off to the
2nd Field Ambulance in the Square nearby. Their headquarters had been
moved to Vlamertinghe and they were evacuating that morning. The
civilians now had got out of the town. All sorts of carts and
wheelbarrows had been called into requisition. There were still some
wounded men in the dressing station and a sergeant was in charge. I
managed to commandeer a motor ambulance and stow them in it. Shells
were falling fast in that part of the town. It was perfectly (p. 069)
impossible to linger any longer. A certain old inhabitant, however,
would not leave. He said he would trust to the good God and stay in
the cellar of his house till the war was over. Poor man, if he did not
change his mind, his body must be in the cellar still, for the last
time I saw the place, which henceforth was known as "Hell Fire Corner,"
there was not one stone left upon another. Only a little brick wall
remaine