e and Nieuport. There was a strange silence
behind the mists, but our aeroplanes, reconnoitring the enemy's lines,
were able to see movements of troops drifting southwards towards
the region round Ypres.

Now there was an awakening of guns in places from which they
seemed to be withdrawn. Dixmude, quiet in its ruins, trembled again,
and crumbled a little more, under the vibration of the enemy's shells,
firing at long range towards the Franco-Belgian troops.

Here and there, near Pervyse and Ramscapelle, guns, not yet
located, fired "pot shots" on the chance of killing something--soldiers
or civilians, or the wounded on their stretchers.

Several of them came into Furnes, bursting quite close to the
convent, and one smashed into the Hotel de la Noble Rose, going
straight down a long corridor and then making a great hole in a
bedroom wall. Some of the officers of the Belgian staff were in the
room downstairs, but not a soul was hurt.

French and Belgian patrols thrusting forward cautiously found
themselves under rifle-fire from the enemy's trenches which had
previously appeared abandoned. Something like an offensive
developed again, and it was an unpleasant surprise when Dixmude
was retaken by the Germans.

As a town its possession was not of priceless value to the enemy.
They had retaken a pitiful ruin, many streets of skeleton houses filled
with burnt-out ashes, a Town Hall with gaping holes in its roof, an
archway which thrust up from a wreck of pillars like a gaunt rib, and a
litter of broken glass, bricks and decomposed bodies.

If they had any pride in the capture it was the completeness of their
destruction of this fine old Flemish town.

But it was a disagreeable thing that the enemy, who had been thrust
back from this place and the surrounding neighbourhood, and who
had abandoned their attack for a time in this region, should have
made such a sudden hark-back in sufficient strength to regain ground
which was won by the Belgian and French at the cost of many
thousands of dead and wounded.

The renewed attack was to call off some of the allied troops from the
lines round Ypres, and was a part of the general shock of the
offensive all along the German line in order to test once more the
weakest point of the Allies' strength through which to force a way.

25

The character of the fighting in this part of Flanders entered into the
monotone of the winter campaign and, though the censorship was
blamed