uttresses and towers.

When I went there two months later I saw Ypres as it stood through the
years of the war that followed, changing only in the disintegration of
its ruin as broken walls became more broken and fallen houses were raked
into smaller fragments by new bombardments, for there was never a day
for years in which Ypres was not shelled.

The approach to it was sinister after one had left Poperinghe and passed
through the skeleton of Vlamertinghe church, beyond Goldfish Chateau...
For a long time Poperinghe was the last link with a life in which men
and women could move freely without hiding from the pursuit of death;
and even there, from time to time, there were shells from long-range
guns and, later, night-birds dropping high-explosive eggs. Round about
Poperinghe, by Reninghelst and Locre, long convoys of motor-wagons,
taking up a new day's rations from the rail-heads, raised clouds of dust
which powdered the hedges white. Flemish cart-horses with huge
fringes of knotted string wended their way between motor-lorries and
gun-limbers. Often the sky was blue above the hop-gardens, with fleecy
clouds over distant woodlands and the gray old towers of Flemish
churches and the windmills on Mont Rouge and Mont Neir, whose sails have
turned through centuries of peace and strife. It all comes back to me as
I write--that way to Ypres, and the sounds and the smells of the roads
and fields where the traffic of war went up, month after month, year
after year.

That day when I saw it first, after the gas-attack, was strangely quiet,
I remember. There was "nothing doing," as our men used to say. The
German gunners seemed asleep in the noonday sun, and it was a charming
day for a stroll and a talk about the raving madness of war under every
old hedge.

"What about lunch in Dickebusch on the way up?" asked one of my
companions. There were three of us.

It seemed a good idea, and we walked toward the village which then--they
were early days!--looked a peaceful spot, with a shimmer of sunshine
above its gray thatch and red-tiled roofs.

Suddenly one of us said, "Good God!"

An iron door had slammed down the corridors of the sky and the hamlet
into which we were just going was blotted out by black smoke, which came
up from its center as though its market-place had opened up and vomited
out infernal vapors.

"A big shell that!" said one man, a tall, lean-limbed officer, who later
in the war was sniper-in-chief of the B