ke
and fell with a crash into the glowing heart of the furnace, which had
once been a Flemish house, raising a fountain of sparks.

Further into the town, however, there stood, by the odd freakishness
of an artillery bombardment, complete houses hardly touched by
shells and, very neat and prim, between masses of shapeless ruins.
One street into which I drove was so undamaged that I could hardly
believe my eyes, having looked back the night before to one great
torch which men called "Dixmude." Nevertheless some of its window-
frames had bulged with heat, and panes of glass fell with a splintering
noise on to the stone pavement. As I passed a hail of shrapnel was
suddenly flung upon the wall on one side of the street and the bullets
played at marbles in the roadway. In this street some soldiers were
grouped about two wounded men, one of them only lightly touched,
the other--a French marine--at the point of death, lying very still in a
huddled way with a clay-coloured face smeared with blood. We
picked them up and put them into one of the ambulances, the dying
man groaning a little as we strapped him on the stretcher.

The Belgian soldiers who had come into the town at dawn stood
about our ambulances as though our company gave them a little
comfort. They did not speak much, but had grave wistful eyes like
men tired of all this misery about them but unable to escape from it.
They were young men with a stubble of fair hair on their faces and
many days' dirt.

"Vous etes tres aimable," said one of them when I handed him a
cigarette, which he took with a trembling hand. Then he stared up the
street as another shower of shrapnel swept it, and said in a hasty
way, "C'est l'enfer... Pour trois mois je reste sous feu. C'est trop,
n'est-ce pas?"

But there was no time for conversation about war and the effects of
war upon the souls of men. The German guns were beginning to
speak again, and unless we made haste we might not rescue the
wounded men.

"Are there many blesses here?" asked our leader.

One of the soldiers pointed to a house which had a tavern sign above
it.

"They've been taken inside," he said. "I helped to carry them." We
dodged the litter in the roadway, where, to my amazement, two old
ladies were searching in the rubbish-heaps for the relics of their
houses. They had stayed in Dixmude during this terrible
bombardment, hidden in some cellar, and now had emerged, in their
respectable black gowns, to see what