t things about Ypres have been left
unsaid.

Near the station there was a man who really could mix cocktails. He was
no blundering amateur, but an expert with the subtlest touch. And in the
Rue de Lille a fashionable dressmaker turned her _atelier_ into a
tea-room. She used to provide coffee or chocolate, or even tea, and the
most delicious little cakes. Of an afternoon you would sit on
comfortable chairs at a neat table covered with a fair cloth and talk to
your hostess. A few hats daintily remained on stands, but, as she said,
they were last year's hats, unworthy of our notice.

A pleasant afternoon could be spent on the old ramparts. We were there,
as a matter of fact, to do a little building-up and clearing-away when
the German itch for destruction proved too strong for their more
gentlemanly feelings. We lay on the grass in the sun and smoked our
pipes, looking across the placid moat to Zillebeke Vyver, Verbranden
Molen, and the slight curve of Hill 60. The landscape was full of
interest. Here was shrapnel bursting over entirely empty fields. There
was a sapper repairing a line. The Germans were shelling the town, and
it was a matter of skill to decide when the lumbersome old shell was
heard exactly where it would fall. Then we would walk back into the town
for tea and look in at that particularly enterprising grocer's in the
Square to see his latest novelties in tinned goods.

From Ypres the best road in Flanders runs by Vlamertinghe to Poperinghe.
It is a good macadam road, made, doubtless by perfidious Albion's money,
just before the war.

Poperinghe has been an age-long rival of Ypres. Even to-day its
inhabitants delight to tell you the old municipal scandals of the larger
town, and the burghers of Ypres, if they see a citizen of Poperinghe in
their streets, believe he has come to gloat over their misfortunes.
Ypres is an Edinburgh and Poperinghe a Glasgow. Ypres was
self-consciously "old world" and loved its buildings. Poperinghe is
modern, and perpetrated a few years ago the most terrible of town halls.
There are no cocktails in Poperinghe, but there is good whisky and most
excellent beer.

I shall never forget my feelings when one morning in a certain
wine-merchant's cellar I saw several eighteen-gallon casks of Bass's
Pale Ale. I left Poperinghe in a motor-ambulance, and the Germans
shelled it next day, but my latest advices state that the ale is still
intact.

Across the road from the wine-merchant