d to show where the garden and house of my landlord had been. I
collected the men of the Ambulance and started off with them to
Vlamertinghe. On the way we added to our numbers men who had either
lost their units or were being sent back from the line.

As we passed through the Grande Place, which now wore a very much more
dilapidated appearance than it had three days before, we found a
soldier on the pavement completely intoxicated. He was quite unconscious
and could not walk. There was nothing to do but to make him as
comfortable as possible till he should awake next day to the horrors
of the real world. We carried him into a room of a house and laid him
on a heap of straw. I undid the collar of his shirt so that he might
have full scope for extra blood pressure and left him to his fate. I
heard afterwards that the house was struck and that he was wounded and
taken away to a place of safety. When we got down to the bridge on the
Vlamertinghe road, an Imperial Signal Officer met me in great
distress. His men had been putting up telegraph wires on the other
side of the canal and a shell had fallen and killed thirteen of them.
He asked our men to carry the bodies back over the bridge and lay them
side by side in an outhouse. The men did so, and the row of mutilated,
twisted and bleeding forms was pitiful to see. The officer was very
grateful to us, but the bodies were probably never buried because that
part of the city was soon a ruin. We went on down the road towards
Vlamertinghe, past the big asylum, so long known as a dressing
station, with its wonderful and commodious cellars. It had been hit
and the upstairs part was no longer used.

The people along the road were leaving their homes as fast as they
could. One little procession will always stand out in my mind. In
front one small boy of about six years old was pulling a toy cart in
which two younger children were packed. Behind followed the mother
with a large bundle on her back. Then came the father with a still
bigger one. There they were trudging along, leaving their home (p. 070)
behind with its happy memories, to go forth as penniless refugees,
compelled to live on the charity of others. It was through no fault of
their own, but only through the monstrous greed and ambition of a
despot crazed with feudal dreams of a by-gone age. As I looked at that
little procession, and at many other similar ones, the words of the
Gospel kept ringing in my ears, "Inasmuch