o the open doors.
The sound of shrapnel is the same sound as hailstones, a crisp crackle
as they strike and bounce. We ran and picked them up. They were blunted
by smiting on the paving. Any one of them would have plowed into soft
flesh and found the bone and shattered it. They seem harmless because
they make so little noise. They don't scream and wail and thunder. Our
guns, back on the hillocks of the Ghent road, grew louder and more
frequent. Each minute now was cut into by a roar, or a fainter rumble.
The battle was on. Our barricaded street was a pocket in the storm, like
the center of a typhoon.

Yonder we could see the canal, fifty feet away, at the foot of our
street. On the farther side behind the river front houses lay the
Germans, ready to sally out and charge. It would be all right if they
came quickly. But a few hours of waiting for them on an empty stomach,
and having them disappoint us, was wearing. We wished they would hurry
and have it over with, or else go away for good. Civilians stumbling and
bleeding went past us.

And that was how the morning went by, heavy footed, unrelieved, with a
sense of waiting for a sudden crash and horror. It was peaceful, in a
way, but, at the heart of the calm, a menace. So we overlaid the tension
with casual petty acts. We made an informal pool of our resources in
tobacco, each man sharing with his neighbor, till nearly every one of us
was puffing away, and deciding there was nothing to this German attack,
after all. A smoke makes just the difference between sticking it out or
acting the coward's part.

Each one of us in a lifetime has a day of days, when external event is
lively, and our inner mood dances to the tune. Some of us will perhaps
always feel that we spent our day on October 21, 1914. For we were
allowed to go into a town that fell in that one afternoon and to come
out again alive. It was the afternoon when Dixmude was leveled from a
fair upstanding city to a heap of scorched brick and crumbled plaster.
The enemy guns from over the Yser were accurate on its houses.

We received our first taste of the dread to come, while we were yet a
little way out. In the road ahead of us, a shell had just splashed an
artillery convoy. Four horses, the driver, and the splintered wood of
the wagon were all worked together into one pulp, so that our car
skidded on it. We entered the falling town of Dixmude. It was a thick
mess into which we rode, with hot smoke and fine ma