ch had been placed for shelter behind
the strongest looking wall in the town, and slowly started for Ypres,
a section of the 10th Canadian Battalion came along with our friend,
Major Maclaren, whom I had talked to at Brielen earlier in the
afternoon, at its head. I waved my hand to him and called "good luck."
He waved his hand in answer with a cheery smile. A couple of hours
later he was wounded and was sent back in the little battalion Ford
car, with another officer, to the ambulance in Vlamertinge. While
passing through Ypres a shell blew both officers' heads off.

At the fork of the roads, Lt.-Col. Mitchell of Toronto, of the
headquarters staff, who was directing traffic, came over and asked us
if we had seen certain Canadian battalions pass by. We told him we had
and we shook hands as we wished each other "good luck," not knowing
whether we should ever meet again. We picked up a load of wounded
Turcos and took them into the ambulance at Ypres. Fresh shell holes
pitted the road and dead horses lay at the side of it. One corner in
particular near Ypres had been shelled very heavily, and broken stone,
pave and bricks lay scattered about everywhere.

All the while the roar of guns and the whistle of flying shells had
increased. We reached the ambulance in Ypres between dusk and dark; it
was light enough to see that the front of the building, which had been
intact earlier in the afternoon, had been already scarred with pieces
of flying shells. The shutters which had been closed were torn and
splintered, and the brick work was pitted with shrapnel. We forced our
Turcos to descend and enter the ambulance, though from their protests
I judged they would have much preferred a continuous passage to the
country beyond Ypres.

As we entered the door Major Hardy (now Colonel Hardy, D.S.O.) was
found operating on one of his own men; the man had been blown off a
water cart down the street and his leg and side filled with shrapnel.
It was rather weird to see this surgeon coolly operating as if he was
in a hospital in Canada, and to hear the shells screaming overhead and
exploding not far away, any one of which might at any moment blow
building, operator and patient to pieces. That is one of the beauties
of the army system; each one in the army "carries on" and does his own
particular bit under all circumstances.

A terrific bang in the street outside, followed by the rattling and
crash of glass and falling of bricks, caused Rad