called on him, and
found him sitting alone in a dugout furnished by odd bits from the
wrecked houses, with waxen flowers in a glass case on the shelf, and
an old cottage clock which ticked out the night, and a velvet armchair
which had been the pride of a Flemish home. He was a Devonshire lad,
with a pale, thoughtful face, and I was sorry for him in his loneliness,
with a roof over his head which would be no proof against a fair-sized
shell.

He expressed no surprise at seeing us. I think he would not have been
surprised if the ghost of Edward the Black Prince had called on him.
He would have greeted him with the same politeness and offered him his
green armchair.

The night passed. The guns slackened down before the dawn. For a little
while there was almost silence, even over the trenches. But as the first
faint glow of dawn crept through the darkness the rifle-fire burst
out again feverishly, and the machine-guns clucked with new spasms of
ferocity. The boys of the New Army, and the Germans facing them, had an
attack of the nerves, as always at that hour.

The flares were still rising, but had the debauched look of belated
fireworks after a night of orgy.

In a distant field a cock crew.

The dawn lightened all the sky, and the shadows crept away from the
ruins of Ypres, and all the ghastly wreckage of the city was revealed
again nakedly. Then the guns ceased for a while, and there was quietude
in the trenches, and out of Ypres, sneaking by side ways, went two tired
figures, padding the hoof with a slouching swiftness to escape the early
morning "hate" which was sure to come as soon as a clock in Vlamertinghe
still working in a ruined tower chimed the hour of six.

I went through Ypres scores of times afterward, and during the battles
of Flanders saw it day by day as columns of men and guns and
pack-mules and transports went up toward the ridge which led at last to
Passchendaele. We had big guns in the ruins of Ypres, and round about,
and they fired with violent concussions which shook loose stones, and
their flashes were red through the Flanders mist. Always this capital of
the battlefields was sinister, with the sense of menace about.

"Steel helmets to be worn. Gas-masks at the alert."

So said the traffic man at the crossroads.

As one strapped on one's steel helmet and shortened the strap of one's
gas-mask, the spirit of Ypres touched one's soul icily.

IX

The worst school of war for the s