r's sake men face again the music of that
infernal orchestra, and listen with a deadly sickness in their hearts to
the song of the shell screaming the French word for kill, which is tue!
tue!

It was at night that I used to see the full splendour of the war's infernal
beauty. After a long day in the fields travelling back in the repeated
journeys to the station of Fortem, where the lightly wounded men
used to be put on a steam tramway for transport to the Belgian
hospitals, the ambulances would gather their last load and go
homeward to Furnes. It was quite dark then, and towards nine o'clock
the enemy's artillery would slacken fire, only the heavy guns sending
out long-range shots. But five towns or more were blazing fiercely in
the girdle of fire, and the sky throbbed with the crimson glare of their
furnaces, and tall trees to which the autumn foliage clung would be
touched with light, so that their straight trunks along a distant highway
stood like ghostly sentinels. Now and again, above one of the burning
towns a shell would burst as though the enemy were not content with
their fires and would smash them into smaller fuel.

As I watched the flames, I knew that each one of those poor burning
towns was the ruin of something more than bricks and mortar. It was
the ruin of a people's ideals, fulfilled throughout centuries of quiet
progress in arts and crafts. It was the shattering of all those things for
which they praised God in their churches--the good gifts of home-life,
the security of the family, the impregnable stronghold, as it seemed,
of prosperity built by labour and thrift now utterly destroyed.

15

I motored over to Nieuport-les-Bains, the seaside resort of the town of
Nieuport itself, which is a little way from the coast. It was one of those
Belgian watering-places much beloved by the Germans before their
guns knocked it to bits--a row of red-brick villas with a few pretentious
hotels utterly uncharacteristic of the Flemish style of architecture,
lining a promenade and built upon the edge of dreary and
monotonous sand-dunes. On this day the place and its neighbourhood
were utterly and terribly desolate. The only human beings I passed
on my car were two seamen of the British Navy, who were fixing
up a wireless apparatus on the edge of the sand. They stared at
our ambulances curiously, and one of them gave me a prolonged
and strenuous wink, as though to say, "A fine old game, mate,
this bloody war!" B