ewn, headless and
limbless, at the corner of the Grande Place. Transport wagons galloped
their way through, between bursts of shell-fire, hoping to dodge them,
and sometimes not dodging them. I saw the litter of their wheels and
shafts, and the bodies of the drivers, and the raw flesh of the dead
horses that had not dodged them. Many men were buried alive in Ypres,
under masses of masonry when they had been sleeping in cellars, and were
wakened by the avalanche above them. Comrades tried to dig them out,
to pull away great stones, to get down to those vaults below from which
voices were calling; and while they worked other shells came and laid
dead bodies above the stones which had entombed their living comrades.
That happened, not once or twice, but many times in Ypres.

There was a Town Major of Ypres. Men said it was a sentence of death
to any officer appointed to that job. I think one of them I met had had
eleven predecessors. He sat in a cellar of the old prison, with walls of
sandbags on each side of him, but he could not sit there very long at
a stretch, because it was his duty to regulate the traffic according to
the shell-fire. He kept a visitors' book as a hobby, until it was buried
under piles of prison, and was a hearty, cheerful soul, in spite of the
menace of death always about him.

VIII

My memory goes back to a strange night in Ypres in those early days. It
was Gullett, the Australian eyewitness, afterward in Palestine, who had
the idea.

"It would be a great adventure," he said, as we stood listening to the
gun-fire over there.

"It would be damn silly," said a staff officer. "Only a stern sense of
duty would make me do it."

It was Gullett who was the brave man.

We took a bottle of Cointreau and a sweet cake as a gift to any
battalion mess we might find in the ramparts, and were sorry for
ourselves when we failed to find it, nor, for a long time, any living
soul.

Our own footsteps were the noisiest sounds as we stumbled over the
broken stones. No other footstep paced down any of those streets of
shattered houses through which we wandered with tightened nerves. There
was no movement among all those rubbish heaps of fallen masonry and
twisted iron. We were in the loneliness of a sepulcher which had been
once a fair city.

For a little while my friend and I stood in the Grande Place, not
speaking. In the deepening twilight, beneath the last flame-feathers of
the sinking sun and the