only happened
once.

On December 13 I went for a walk of inspection as far as Dan Cottages,
some old German pill-boxes, where the forward brigade had their H.Q.
For the first mile or so from Ypres the ground seemed to be recovering
from the heavy shelling it had received, and there was a good deal of
grass now growing about the old British front line trenches. But as
you got farther forward to the area of the heavy guns, the ground was
badly shattered and every shell-hole full of water. Between this point
and B.H.Q. the conditions were simply awful. A vast swamp of
yellow-brown mud divided into craters of large size--all full of
watery slime. And so it went on as far as the eye could see.

Here and there there were oases of dry ground, generally holding
several heavy guns and dumps of ammunition. Whilst at intervals the
swamp was intersected by a wooden road, used by the lorries to bring
up ammunition, and by two or three duck-board tracks which ran winding
through the awful mess of mud and water. These tracks were supported
on wooden piles driven into the mud, and were more like wooden bridges
than tracks. Sometimes they rested on firm ground, but mostly they
were held up in the air by the wooden piles. Again right through the
devastated area ran a good paved road from Ypres towards Zonnebeke.
Here and there in some of the drier spots you could see queer white
mounds--the concrete pill-boxes, some of which were still sound
enough, but others broken in and waterlogged. The pill-boxes and the
road and the wooden tracks were of course well known to the German
artillery, who lavished a great deal of ammunition every day on each
of these targets. But owing to the methodical way in which the Germans
fired on the tracks, it was always possible to mend them wherever they
were smashed. Between 2 A.M. and 8 A.M. practically no shells came
over on to the tracks, and during this time each day gangs of men went
out and mended the damage done to them.

When the frost came and solidified the mud, travelling became safer if
not so easy; for it was then possible to leave the tracks and go
across country by walking round the edges of the shell craters. All
along the road there was ceaseless activity day and night. Lines and
lines of lorries going backwards or forwards, limbers, wagons, men.
When the enemy shelled the road, generally some damage was done, and
it was not uncommon to see pools of blood in the road and the litter
of br