Broken car springs on February 1st took me to Poperinghe, where a Belgian carriage-maker made a villainous repair for a considerable charge.

Motor car repairs were fearfully and wonderfully executed at the front in the earlier stages of the war. The G.H.Q. shops were not bad, and once in a while I found clever, conscientious young chaps in charge of a road-side repair shop attached to a division, an ammunition supply column, or some such unit, who had managed to organise a very creditable "first-aid and emergency hospital" for the ills a car was heir to.

All too often some A.S.C. officer in charge, however, knew as little of the mechanism of an automobile and how to put it in order as one could well imagine. I remember one youth, possessed of a wonderful opinion of his own efficiency, whose mechanical experience had been gained in a railway workshop. He ordered repairs to be done in weird fashion at times. As soon as he had delivered his dictum and departed, his chief non-commissioned officer would put the men right, generally by a complete reversal of the youngster's orders, and all would go happily until he might again put in an appearance, when the work would suffer proportionately to the time he spent in its vicinity.

Stories of the excellence of the performance of individual cars were often marvellous. One big limousine, which had been "out since the first of the show," was ever the boast of the Major to whom it was assigned and of his faithful chauffeur. At tea one day it transpired that the car, which the Major was always ready to declare had run sans repaire et sans reproche during the whole campaign, was in the repair park for its "initial derangement." Calling at the repair lorry early next morning, I was astounded to hear the A.S.C. sergeant-major in charge say to the major's chauffeur: "So you have done in the old girl again, have you? Let's see, that's the third time this month, ain't it? Why the Major hasn't sent the bally old wreck in months ago to get her put in decent shape, I don't know. Not a bit of use tinkering at her all the time. She's given us more bother than any car in the division."

How we did chip the Major! Motorists' yarns bear some odd relationship to fishermen's stories, so I have heard.

Taken generally, the British cars at the Front ran most creditably. The conditions could not have been more trying, and the Daimlers and Rolls-Royces lived up to their reputations in fine style. Cars of half a score of makes were attached to the 1st Cavalry Division while I was with it, and I studied their performances with close attention. For reliability and lack of trouble a large Daimler easily bore away the honours.

Cold forges and a disinclination on the part of the smith to light them on an afternoon necessitated my spending a night in Poperinghe. The town was crowded with Belgian inhabitants and refugees, and with French troops of the 16th Corps, which was at that time being relieved from the trench work by British soldiers, and was mobilising in Poperinghe to be sent south and east, detachment after detachment, to its own dear France.

A winter in Flanders, particularly in Flemish trenches, is not a happy experience. The French were therefore openly delighted at the prospect of departure to more pleasant and congenial climes.

I should have had to sleep in my car but for the kindly offices of a French Staff officer, who procured for me a clean, soft bed in the Hotel La Bourse.

An evening among French soldiers, though they might be tired, trench-stained and campaign worn, was sure to be a pleasurable one. Songs from chansons d'amour to grand opera, from poor Harry Fragson's "Marguerita," to swinging marching airs of older wars, were sung with a vim.

The French troopers possessed a suspicion of the grand air when drinking a toast, carolling a love-ditty, or roaring out a rousing chorus. One or two veterans I met in Poperinghe might have stepped from a volume of Dumas. An elder one was a bachelor of arts and science, a man of studious and thoughtful mien. His comrade was a true Gascon, and a third of the group was blessed with powers of mimicry that made us laugh long and loud before the night was over.

Every man of them was proud and fond of his British allies.

French soldiers did not pay the same attention to cleanliness of uniform and kit that was given to such details by the British Tommy. An English battalion, relieved from muddy trenches, at once smartened its external appearance to a degree that had to be seen to be believed. Tommy worked wonders in a day.

The long-tailed blue coats of the French infantry were difficult to clean, once they became mud-caked.

The amount of equipment, and its variety, that the average French foot-soldier strapped upon his back, was wonderful. I saw one black-bearded "poilu," with a typical load, start off with his company for a long, long march, with literally as much as he could pack about him, fastened securely by ingenious means. Over either shoulder was a strap supporting two good-sized canvas haversacks, one on each hip, both bulging with food. To his belt were attached two ample cartridge-pouches, one in front and one behind. A water-bottle dangled against a haversack. His principal pack, hung at the shoulder, was, he told me, full of spare clothing. A blanket, rolled in a sheepskin jacket, surmounted this and towered above his cap. A cooking-pot adorned the back of his pack, while to one side of it was strapped a tin cup of ample dimensions, and to the other a loaf of bread, already become soggy in the steady drizzle. A bundle of firewood at his side, and a roll of clothing, holding an extra shirt or two, at the other, flanked him.

My examination of his equipment concluded, he said he must be off, and picked up his rifle with a cheery smile. A comrade rushed up and handed him a sort of leather portmanteau. He grabbed it without a word, threw the strap over his head, settled his various pieces of baggage into place with a strenuous shake, and stamped away sturdily, with a firm step and head held high.

He left me wondering that this sort of soldier should make marching records of which any army in the world might be proud, yet such was undeniably the case.

In billets, the British cavalry were having a thorough course of instruction in the work of the foot soldier. Dismounted attack, trench digging, musketry instruction, bomb-throwing classes, and all manner of miscellaneous tutelage progressed steadily.

I had a look at Ypres one morning. It was again peopled with a sufficient number of civilians to give me a sense of forgetfulness as to its proximity to the German gun positions.

Of all the attributes of the Belgian people, their persistence in making back to their homes in a shelled area, as soon as the shells ceased falling, was the most prominent.

Many of the peasants pursued their daily round of labour under shell-fire. Many others left the bombarded fields or villages, albeit reluctantly, only to return as soon as the shell splinters had ceased to spatter about.

What feeling actuated them was a psychological study. They were phlegmatic as a people. I have seen Russian soldiers perform feats that were described by different observers of the same episode as bravery or stupidity, according to the reading of the onlooker. Was the Belgian who drifted back to his own or some other man's home in shell-ruined Ypres brave or thick-headed? I left one opinion for another, only to abandon it in turn. A study of various types in Flanders helped me but little.

Hard-worked toilers, whose lives have been one continual round of labour, are, more often than not, fatalists. Such lives produce men and women who accept conditions blindly and uncomplainingly. A peculiar love of the soil which they have tilled, and from which they have sprung, seemed to take the place in many Flemish peasants of the more definite and definable Anglo-Saxon or Gallic spirit of intense patriotism. Many poor folk seemed possessed of a blind instinct that "home" was safest, and once "home" was lost, nothing worthy of preservation remained. Their attitude toward death bordered on indifference.

Motor-buses were bringing the 28th Division to the Ypres Salient as I passed on my homeward journey.

Rumours of an attack on the German line flew from lip to lip. That night I read from an eminent French military authority that "to attack, unless with a definite object in view, with a very reasonable chance of success, and with the surety that you can hold what you gain if the attack succeeds, is a crime."

In the second week in February, at a dinner in St. Omer, a member of the French Mission at British Headquarters told me that eighty-seven French general officers had been "relieved of their command" since the commencement of the war. These generals were "sent down" for incompetency, evidenced in various ways, to command the troops under them. The extremely small number of British generals who had been "replaced" stood out in very sharp contrast to this total, with which fact should be remembered the complete difference as to policy with reference to such replacements between the French and British War Office methods.

Early in February, the 1st Cavalry Division staff was blessed with the arrival of Major Desmond Fitzgerald (11th Hussars), who took Major Hambro's place as G.S.O. 2.

The total tally of British casualties was announced during the first week in the month as 104,000, having exceeded, in less than six months of warfare, the numerical strength of the original British Expeditionary Force.

A day "in front," with the engineers, mapping out new trenches and reserve positions, showed to how great an extent modern gun-fire had changed military theory.

Before the War, a trench line was sought in a position that commanded a good "field of fire," i.e., that had in front of it as much open ground as possible.

This war had taught that the most important item in the selection of a trench position was the extent to which the line could be hidden from the enemy gunners. The space commanded by the occupants of the trench and the nature of the terrain were secondary to the cardinal point of keeping the trenches well out of sight of enemy observers.

Thus engineers might, years ago, select a hilltop as a trench position, the line commanding the receding slope to the valley below. After the experience of the greatest of all wars, they would preferably place it fifty yards behind the summit. More than fifty yards of "field of fire" was desirable, but not absolutely necessary. A fifty-yard space could be so covered with wire entanglements as sufficiently to delay an attacking enemy. Deep, narrow trenches with traverses to restrict the area of damage from shells bursting in the actual trench, and to protect from enfilade fire, were demanded by the newer conditions, but great care had to be taken that they should not be constructed in ground of so soft a nature that howitzer fire could too easily cave in the trench sides.

We found it possible to select a trench line that could be well concealed, which, if taken by the enemy, would be under perfect observation from our own gunners and by them easily rendered untenable for the Huns.

That the British were clever in this work of placing trenches in invisible positions was proven by the following report of an interview in Courtrai with a wounded German officer, whose regiment had been badly handled when attacking an English position in the Ypres Salient:—

Careful study of German methods of counter-attack were productive of many an idea.

The Hun counter-attacks were delivered immediately after the loss of a position—as successful counter-attacks must be.

A trench which was thought a good defensive one by its occupants was sometimes attacked by the Germans, taken, and immediately transformed into a good defensive trench from the other point of view. The way in which the German first line of attack was followed by a second line, bearing shovels, barbed wire, bombs, and grenades, and the manner in which this second line was put to work, showed that the brain conducting operations was close at hand, if not actually on the spot.

The planning and carrying out of some of these small attacks were worthy of great praise. Our troops soon caught the idea and put it into practice with increasingly beneficial results.

On Sunday, February 21st, the 2nd Cavalry Division were in the trenches in the Ypres Salient. The Huns exploded a mine in front of Zillebeke and took sixty yards of trenches that were occupied by the 16th Lancers. A counter-attack, delayed a bit, was launched unsuccessfully, and cost the cavalry four officers killed, one died of wounds, one missing (thought sure to be killed), and four wounded—ten officers in all, and about fifty per cent. of the men engaged.

The Canadian Division arrived in France in mid-February—a splendid lot of men.

Trench-mortars and bombs of various sorts put in an appearance and classes were held daily to accustom the men to the new types of trench weapons. A 3·7 affair of gas-pipe, throwing a 4½-pound projectile, was the most prevalent mortar. Prematures and accidents of all kinds accompanied its introduction, and more than one good man was killed before the troops learned the intricacies of the bombs.

General Foch was at Cassel with his Headquarters. Dinner in Cassel was always productive of a talk on instructive and entertaining subjects. The average French Staff officer was wonderfully "keen on his job."

The French system of espionage was by no means to be despised. The reports from their "agents" were astonishingly accurate.

That Staff work should be the subject of many an after-dinner chat was but natural. The French view of the difference between French and British Staff work, compiled from many a conversation with officers of all ranks, I understood to be generally as follows:—

British Staff work could not fairly be compared to French Staff work, because of the lack of opportunity accorded the British Army, before the War, to handle large bodies of troops. Furthermore, the English Army contained many officers who entered the Army as something in the nature of a pastime rather than a serious profession. Some of these officers even went through the Staff School, though lacking that devoted concentration on their profession as a life-work, which characterised their French prototypes. Very few officers entered the French Army and qualified for staff positions who did not look upon a military career in a very serious light. French Staff officers gained their steps by force of sheer merit and close application to their work.

Nothing else counted, they said. Not a big staff, but one that was efficient beyond all question, was the French aim.

The British soldier, I found, was in most instances frankly conceded to be the best war material in the field—friend or foe. That the British leaders often bungled was openly alleged, but by no means always proven in argument, at least, to my satisfaction.

A failure to arrange support, a badly planned attack, bad Staff work here and there, were quoted in more than one instance.

"It is the soldier who suffers," said one of the most brilliant Frenchmen with whom I met. "He suffers in silence. Perhaps he what you call 'grouses,' but he stands it. The French soldier would not do so in anything like the same spirit. The waste of men and the bad handling of them that once or twice I have seen on the British front, would ruin a French commander for ever."

Universally the French officers praised General Sir Douglas Haig. He had completely won their admiration at Ypres.

"But the best of the British Staff work," said another French officer, "is that it is improving. The English are not afraid to admit they don't know, and are quick to absorb new ideas. Give them time."

I have quoted the more trenchant criticisms that came to my ears, for they fell from the lips of the keenest and most brilliant French Staff officers, invariably those who held the British Tommy in the highest possible esteem.

These officers were from the class of man one would choose to put in charge of a dry dock, a line of railway, a huge business or a gigantic manufactory. They impressed me as good "business men." More than a few British Staff officers I met, particularly in the Cavalry arm of the Service, were equally clever, and every whit as keen on their work, but no one who wished to be impartial could fail to note the inclusion now and then, on the Staff, of men to whom one would never dream of entrusting the management of a large commercial organisation or the conduct of an important factory plant.

The 3rd and 2nd Cavalry Divisions having each done ten days of trench occupation in the Ypres Salient, on February 23rd, the 1st Cavalry Division moved to Ypres to take its ten days of duty in the firing line.

The run to Ypres, vi Steenvoorde and Poperinghe, was a trying one. The road surface was inconceivably damaged and very slippery. All manner of French and British transport and general traffic filled the highway.

In the western edge of Ypres, in front of the first cluster of houses—buildings shell-marked and war-scarred from long bombardment—three grimy mites were playing in the dirt at the street-side. Further on, a trio of little girls in soiled black frocklets were enjoying a game of tag. Across the street they darted, under the wheels of cars and lorries, missing the hoofs of the passing horses by inches. One bright-eyed little girl, out of breath from dodging a fast-drawn artillery limber, took momentary refuge in a ragged gap in a shell-shattered dwelling. As we approached the Grand Place more children were to be seen, then a number of adult townsfolk. Round the gaping ruins of the once beautiful Cloth Hall, in the main square, the number of people in evidence might well have led one to believe that the bombardment of Ypres was past and done with. Ruins, the work of shells and conflagrations, were on all sides, but no one noticed them. French and English soldiers and their officers, with a liberal smattering of civilian Belgians, filled the pavements. Down the Rue de Menin, at the approach of the Menin Bridge, we found the headquarters of General Hubert Gough, of the 2nd Cavalry Division, located in a brewery standing in the shadow of the high moat wall. The trenches lay, roughly, three miles beyond the city walls to the eastward. The junction of the British left with the French right was south of the Menin Road, in front of Zillebeke. The trenches we were to occupy ran east and west and faced south.

Detachments of sturdy French infantry marched past, their uniforms faded to a pale blue. With swinging step, each individual marched to his own time. I admired their fit and willing appearance. They were campaign-worn as to kit and clothing, but campaign-hardened, rather than worn, as to themselves.

A constant stream of people came and went. How long would the civilian population of Ypres remain to pay its toll of dead whenever the Germans decided further to shell the town?

Three women passed, two of them bearing month-old babies in their arms. Noting my interested glance they smiled and waved as they trudged on. What a place for a baby!

An old bent crone, crowned with a richly beaded bonnet of ancient type, in odd incongruity to the ragged condition and mean original state of the remainder of her apparel, hobbled along, pausing now and again to pick up and store safely in her apron small pieces of coal that had been dropped from a passing wagon.

More French soldiers passed. Then a couple of British officers rode by in the picturesque uniform of some Scotch regiment of the line. A transport wagon rumbled by, and behind it came a young girl, with a bucket of water on her head, smilingly exchanging banter with a soldier of the British military police, at the corner of the street.

It was a quiet Spring afternoon, a bit overcast. Hardly to be called lowering, and yet of a stillness that seemed ominous. A day to fit all the mixture of folk going stolidly, carelessly, gaily, or how they would, about their daily tasks.

No one seemed to realise that they were in Ypres—the Ypres which had so often been shattered by shell that the poor old town could hardly be surprised by any sort of new shell-caprice. No one saw the rent walls and gaping holes in every other building. I wondered if they could hear the guns! I could do so. They were hard at it every moment, all the time, from two to three miles distant. It was the old story of familiarity breeding contempt; or perhaps they were true philosophers, these Ypres folk.

General de Lisle ran to Potijze, to the headquarters of General Lefebvre, who commanded the French 18th Division. It seemed ages since I had been in Potijze. Our headquarters were not far beyond it in November, 1914, during the great first battle of Ypres.

On the way from Ypres along the Zonnebeke road we passed bunches of odd little French horse transport wagons. The road was very bad. We progressed in crawfish fashion, most of the way. The pavÉ was torn terribly by shell-fire, and there was sufficient mud and slime on it to make it extremely slippery. French soldiers were billeted in the dwellings along the road. At the edge of Potijze a dozen young boys and girls stood outside a house.

Returning to General Gough's headquarters we "took them over," as that night we were to relieve the 2nd Cavalry Division troopers in the trench line.

General de Lisle and Colonel Home ran up the Menin Road a kilometre or so, and, leaving the car, walked across the fields past the ruins that will always bear the name of "Cavan's House."

The General told me to put the car in the shelter of a house on the south side of the road, as shell-fire and the Menin Road were never strangers for long. I settled down to wait until the General had concluded his rounds of the prospective positions.

The Ypres-Menin Road will be remembered oh! so long, and oh! so well. It saw rough times.

Field guns near by started to work, and now and then German shells dropped in a field beyond.

The house behind which I was sheltered, in case of a stray shell, was a one-storey affair of modest mien.

Those of its windows which were not shattered were shuttered. Half of the roof had been shorn of its tiles. A shell had wrecked the interior of one end of the building. A glance out of a rear door-way showed a whole collection of shell-holes in the yard a few feet distant.

A door that still remained in position bore four lines of legend:

"Vin a vingt
Sous la Bouteille.
Confiture, allumettes.
Bougies, chocolate."

Glancing through one of the remaining panes of a window by the door, I saw a glass jar containing a couple of sticks of chocolate, beside it three jars of jelly, a box of French matches, a blue paper packet of half a dozen candles, a score of small oranges in one box, and in another, alongside it, seven or eight very dry-looking kippers. Peering through the partly-obscured glass one could see a stolid-looking, red-faced, albino-haired woman.

"Business as usual," with a vengeance! Such an odd curiosity shop as this was not to be passed without examination, so I entered and talked to the woman.

Her whole stock-in-trade was what I had seen through the window. She was cheerful enough, though she huddled for warmth over a fire by which sat a despondent-looking brother. She chatted laconically about the situation, and told me she had been there continuously throughout the fighting. The shell that hit the building was a shrapnel and came a month before. Shells still came near, now and again, but that fact seemed to be accepted by her as inevitable and not to be worried about. These people had no means of existence except the sale of their pitiable bits of provisions. They were in daily danger of their lives. Yet they stayed on—odd folk. Typical Belgians.

The gun-fire dropped, then began again spasmodically. I could hear the snipers at work. In the gathering twilight the rattle of rifle fire and the storm of the rapid-fire guns sounded clearly on the left. A fusillade on the right reminded me that the Ypres position was a salient. Directly in front, down that Menin Road, which had seen the taking of so many tens of thousands of lives during the past months, a roll of rifle fire made waves of sound.

Night fell, cold and damp. The making of a light was not permitted; so I waited in the dark, watching the night lights rise and fall over the trenches, until the General and Colonel Home returned, when we ran back to Ypres for dinner.

My first four days in Ypres were uneventful. On the fifth, I went up into the trenches, and saw more of actual trench conditions than I had seen for some time.

Our daily round led me out on the Menin Road, well towards Hooge, or to Potijze on the Zonnebeke Road, several times each day. Shells went over us now and again. Rarely did a day pass when the Huns did not bombard the railway station in Ypres. As we were quartered in the eastern edge of the town the shells aimed at the station bothered us but little. Sometimes a Black Maria lit on the moat wall, where we walked at times, but we timed our exercise so that our promenade and the arrival of the big shells never coincided. Once or twice bits of shell fell over the Headquarters buildings, or rattled down on our paved courtyard, but rarely.

Every morning saw Ypres wrapped in a snow mantle, which was turned before noontide, to a coverlet of black mud. No fires were allowed, except small wood blazes in the open, as smoke from a chimney would have invited a shell.

One day I was searching for a shop where bolts could, once upon a time, be purchased. As I was going down the Rue de Lille, half a dozen shells fell near. One demolished a house but fifty yards ahead. I took shelter in a doorway, and as I did so a Belgian of woebegone appearance, his most characteristic feature a pair of sad, drooping, yellow moustachios, ambled past me down the roadway, pushing a wheelbarrow. On it were three tiny tots, all under four years old. They cuddled together for warmth. One, round-eyed, at the crash of the howitzer shells, was hard at work with a nursing bottle. I warned the Belgian of impending danger, but he stolidly trudged on. Luckily, no more shells came for a time.

The Menin Road proper was never healthy. I spent as little time on it as consistent with the proper performance of my work. I never sat for an hour in its vicinity, waiting for the General, that some shell did not fall near it.

One afternoon shrapnel fell for an hour near a fork on the Menin Road, which all sensible men gave a wide berth to when convenient. Fifteen minutes after the bombardment died down, a procession filed by the fork, headed for a graveyard in the direction of Hooge. A white-robed boy, with red-tasselled black cap, led the way, bearing a cross. Behind him came a robed priest, then an ancient, dilapidated, one-horse hearse containing a rude, black coffin. A score of mourners, one or two of them men, the rest women and children, dressed in their poor best, brought up the rear.

I wondered that they ventured down that shell-swept highway. Yet many such pathetic little processions passed along that road in those days.

I saw one cortÈge wait for a cessation of the shelling, then proceed slowly over the ground that had but a few minutes before been peppered with bits of shell. It was an odd sight. A tiny lad trotted in front under a large wooden cross painted purple. A quartette of little boys behind him bore a rude unpainted sort of stretcher, apparently improvised from the nearest bits of shattered timber to hand. The coffin, resting upon this frame, was covered with a dingy white sheet. A mother, bowed and feeble, followed the coffin. A few youths and a handful of little girls formed the straggling cortÈge, tramping over the snow-covered cobbles, their eyes downcast and red.

Death was no stranger in Ypres in those days, but still the Belgians stayed on.

The wall of a ruined building, across the road from the Cloth Hall, fell one morning with a loud crash. A column of dust arose. That many were not injured was surprising. One woman was killed and a couple of passing French soldiers hurt, but post-card vendors were exhibiting their wares under an adjacent wall, equally dangerous, an hour later.

General de Lisle went personally over the whole of the line held by his Division. The 1st Cavalry Brigade was in the front trenches for the first five days, the 2nd Brigade in reserve. Then the 2nd Brigade took over the trenches and the 1st Brigade came back, for the second five days, to the dug-outs.

At points in the line the trenches were knee-deep and sometimes even waist-deep with cold mud and water. The amount of manual labour required to get them into better shape was enormous. New trenches had to be dug, the old parapets strengthened, the trenches drained, and all the while certain mining work must be pushed on at a rapid rate. In some parts of the line the parapets of sandbags had become so thin that a Mauser bullet could plough through them easily. The German snipers were at one place only thirty yards distant.

The drainage of the worst bits of trench, and the laying of a sort of corduroy road from point to point, soon made the trenches much more habitable.

De Lisle was most thorough. Only a couple of casualties occurred when the 1st Brigade "took over," in spite of the constant sniping. Careful preparations of foot baths and relays of dry socks saved the Division from the epidemic of "foot-casualties," from which some other divisions had suffered heavily. A dozen casualties per day were inevitable from shells and snipers. Those who had to "go up" with food and ammunition had to cross a dangerous zone, a certain toll being taken day and night, in some localities.

Inspecting the trench-line, when the Division had occupied it but the night before, was a precarious business. De Lisle and General Briggs were going over the ground when a German sniper but fifteen to twenty yards distant opened fire. Lieutenant Bell-Irving, General Briggs' A.D.C., received a nasty wound in the hip. He fell in the deep mud. Colonel "Tommy" Pitman, of the 11th Hussars, jumped out into the centre of the trench, and strove to lift Bell-Irving clear, and get him behind the protection of a transept. The bullets flew about the Colonel, two cutting clean through his clothing, one on either side of his body, but he escaped unhurt, and pulled Bell-Irving into safety.

But the trouble was by no means over. A sharp fire was kept up by the Hun snipers, which prevented the removal of Bell-Irving to the dressing station. Captain Moriarty of the R.A.M.C. came up at considerable risk, and advised that the wounded officer be brought back at the earliest possible moment.

There were no means of doing this save to construct a traverse of sandbags, behind which Bell-Irving could be carried. The work must be done under the heavy sniping fire. The troopers of the 11th Hussars at once set about the work with a will, and soon accomplished it, but not before a private had been killed and a sergeant wounded by the German marksmen.

That night a bombing party "cleared out" the district near that transept, and made the snipers' point of vantage untenable.

Each night a splendid pyrotechnic display showed the curved outlines of the Salient. The German trench lights were far superior to ours. Each night, too, Ypres was full of French or British lines of soldiers marching on in the dark to relieve some of their fellows in the trenches outside the town.

The ruins of the Cloth Hall, and of the St. Martin Cathedral by it, formed interesting studies for my camera. The fine mural paintings on the walls of the roofless Grand Gallery in the Cloth Hall were crumbling to bits. My photographs were the last records made of them, for they fell piece by piece not long afterward.

I watched operations at a French Divisional Headquarters one evening. It was not more than a mile back of the line. Wagons were loading, preparatory to being taken trenchwards at dusk. Timber, thousands on thousands of empty bags, rolls of barbed wire, odd shaped completed wire entanglements, metal shields varying from curved sheet-steel bastions a dozen feet in length to small V-shaped iron castings, all manner of wooden troughs, boxes, stands, supports, periscopes, braziers, rolls of fine wire, boxes of trench bombs and grenades, shovels, picks, and many peculiar tools were among the collection of material that was to find its way to the firing line. I learnt much of the business side of trench warfare that night.

The supply of ammunition and food and its distribution are most methodically managed by the French.

Taking up giant powder for mining operation was an item of the day's work. A story was told by one of our sappers, of a couple of Irish troopers who had started across the fields in front of Zillebeke as night was falling, with a good sized load of powder in a box. Shortly after they left Cavan's House shells fell in profusion over the route that they had chosen. Another group started trenchward, carrying various types of grenades. Howitzer shells were falling, front and rear, and shrapnel bursting a few hundred yards away.

A flash and a crash came from in front.

"Them fellers with the joynt powder was like to be in that shindy," said a member of the second party. "Close to 'em, it was, sure."

A moment later they came upon a strange sight. There in the field, just visible in the gathering darkness, sat the box. Behind it reclined the two troopers, snuggling close for cover.

"What are you doin' in this 'ere peaceful spot, Dan?" questioned one of the second party as they reached the box.

"Takin' cover the whiles we do a bit of a rest-like," was the reply. "The divils sent wan so clost, it shure jarred the wind out av us, it did."

And they snuggled closer to the giant powder as he spoke.

Hour by hour I watched the "75's." Their marksmanship was wonderful. The rapidity with which the guns were served was an eye-opener. The French gunners burst shrapnel practically over the heads of our men in the front trenches, to cover the area twenty-five yards beyond them. One trooper swore a French shell, aimed to worry sapping operations by the Huns a short distance in front of our trenches, came so close that it knocked the top sandbag off our parapet. Certain it was that the word was frequently passed to "lie low while the '75's' fire just above us."

My day to go up to the trenches came at last. My guide was Captain Bretherton, the Staff Captain of the 1st Cavalry Brigade.

Leaving my car at the "Halte," a point where the railway crosses the Menin Road, and the Zillebeke Road branches off to the south, we were soon slipping, sliding and ploughing along through the muddy fields. We followed no particular pathway, avoiding where possible fields where enemy shells were falling. The rotting mangel-wurzels dotted the ground all about us. Shell-holes in thousands, positions where French or British batteries had made a stand, trenches in lines and circles, and barbed wire entanglements, caught my attention at every step. Sprinkled everywhere were all manner of pieces of projectile—from complete 6-inch German shells, unexploded, to blue shrapnel cartridges, bright-nosed timing fuses, and jagged bits of all shapes and sizes.

Cavan's House was but a wall, a pile of shapeless bricks and mortar beside it. Cavan's Dug-out, a series of holes in the road bank, roofed with sandbags, held a signal party. Every day a storm of shell visited the spot, and Hun snipers made one wary thereabouts.

We walked on, up the roadway, our objective the Sanctuary Wood. The bullets sang over us, and shells burst in front with a continuous din. A path led through the scrub. Entering the wood, we passed innumerable little individual funk holes. The trees were in splinters and tatters. Here I saw an abandoned shirt, there a khaki cap. My foot hit against a regulation mess tin, and as it turned I saw a rifle-hole drilled in its bottom. Now we were ankle, now knee, deep in sticky mud. Bullets became more plentiful overhead.

A turn down a muddy path led us through a last piece of woods, across sloughs of slime, over a creek, up a slight slope, and there we were at General Briggs's Brigade Headquarters. These were a line of dug-outs in the hillside, a corduroy road winding from entrance to entrance. A deep approach trench, looking like a drain, led one hundred and fifty yards further to the front trenches.

Shells fell all the afternoon on our right and behind us, and the song of the Mauser bullets never ceased. At dusk, I was "safe" back in Ypres.

On my way back through the woods, shell-smashed, that covered the gentle hills through which the front line trenches ran, I saw a burial party.

I stopped a moment, and watched the laying to rest of all that was mortal of three troopers who had paid the great price.

Their comrades placed them reverently in the shallow graves in the soft earth of the hillside, marking each grave with a white wooden cross bearing each hero's name, his rank, and regiment.

Oh, those rows of rude wooden crosses! What thoughts their memory brings to mind! Gone now, many of them, ploughed under by long months of shell-fire, or trampled under foot by the ebb and flow of battle, as the lines have swept back and forth with the tide of war. Gone, perhaps, from the scarred and mangled hill-sides of Flanders; but never to go altogether from the hearts of those who knew them, and who realised their worth.