bs of its broken houses. (I knew a boy from Fleet Street who was
cobbler there in a room between the ruins.) Those Germans gazed down the
roads to Vierstraat and Vormizeele, and watched for the rising of
white dust which would tell them when men were marching by--more cannon
fodder. Southward they saw Neuve Eglise, with its rag of a tower, and
Plug Street wood. In cheerful mood, on sunny days, German gunners with
shells to spare ranged upon separate farm-houses and isolated barns
until they became bits of oddly standing brick about great holes. They
shelled the roads down which our transport wagons went at night, and the
communication trenches to which our men moved up to the front lines,
and gun-positions revealed by every flash, and dugouts foolishly frail
against their 5.9's, which in those early days we could only answer by
a few pip-squeaks. They made fixed targets of crossroads and points our
men were bound to pass, so that to our men those places became sinister
with remembered horror and present fear: Dead Horse Corner and Dead
Cow Farm, and the farm beyond Plug Street; Dead Dog Farm and the Moated
Grange on the way to St.-Eloi; Stinking Farm and Suicide Corner and
Shell-trap Barn, out by Ypres.

All the fighting youth of our race took their turn in those places,
searched along those roads, lived in ditches and dugouts there, under
constant fire. In wet holes along the Yser Canal by Ypres, young
officers who had known the decencies of home life tried to camouflage
their beastliness by giving a touch of decoration to the clammy walls.
They bought Kirchner prints of little ladies too lightly clad for the
climate of Flanders, and pinned them up as a reminder of the dainty
feminine side of life which here was banished. They brought broken
chairs and mirrors from the ruins of Ypres, and said, "It's quite cozy,
after all!"

And they sat there chatting, as in St. James's Street clubs, in the same
tone of voice, with the same courtesy and sense of humor--while they
listened to noises without, and wondered whether it would be to-day or
to-morrow, or in the middle of the sentence they were speaking, that
bits of steel would smash through that mud above their heads and tear
them to bits and make a mess of things.

There was an officer of the Coldstream Guards who sat in one of these
holes, like many others. A nice, gentle fellow, fond of music, a fine
judge of wine, a connoisseur of old furniture and good food. It was
c