ons of gentlemen was, in those early
days, and for long afterward, Hooge. That was the devil's playground
and his chamber of horrors, wherein he devised merry tortures for young
Christian men. It was not far out of Ypres, to the left of the Menin
road, and to the north of Zouave Wood and Sanctuary Wood. For a time
there was a chateau there called the White Chateau, with excellent
stables and good accommodation for one of our brigade staffs, until one
of our generals was killed and others wounded by a shell, which broke up
their conference. Afterward there was no chateau, but only a rubble
of bricks banked up with sandbags and deep mine-craters filled with
stinking water slopping over from the Bellewarde Lake and low-lying
pools. Bodies, and bits of bodies, and clots of blood, and green
metallic-looking slime, made by explosive gases, were floating on the
surface of that water below the crater banks when I first passed that
way, and so it was always. Our men lived there and died there within a
few yards of the enemy, crouched below the sand-bags and burrowed in
the sides of the crater. Lice crawled over them in legions. Human flesh,
rotting and stinking, mere pulp, was pasted into the mud-banks. If they
dug to get deeper cover their shovels went into the softness of dead
bodies who had been their comrades. Scraps of flesh, booted legs,
blackened hands, eyeless heads, came falling over them when the enemy
trench-mortared their position or blew up a new mine-shaft.

I remember one young Irish officer who came down to bur quarters on a
brief respite from commanding the garrison at Hooge. He was a handsome
fellow, like young Philip of Spain by Velasquez, and he had a profound
melancholy in his eyes in spite of a charming smile.

"Do you mind if I have a bath before I join you?" he asked.

He walked about in the open air until the bath was ready. Even there a
strong, fetid smell came from him.

"Hooge," he said, in a thoughtful way, "is not a health resort."

He was more cheerful after his bath and did not feel quite such a leper.
He told one or two stories about the things that happened at Hooge,
and I wondered if hell could be so bad. After a short stay he went back
again, and I could see that he expected to be killed. Before saying
good-by he touched some flowers on the mess-table, and for a moment or
two listened to birds twittering in the trees.

"Thanks very much," he said. "I've enjoyed this visit a good deal.. .