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They made fixed targets of crossroads and points our men were bound to pass, so that to our men those places became sinister with remembered horror and present fear: Dead Horse Corner and Dead Cow Farm, and the farm beyond Plug Street; Dead Dog Farm and the Moated Grange on the way to St.-Eloi; Stinking Farm and Suicide Corner and Shell-trap Barn, out by Ypres.
It was the first time we had seen the raw wounds of a bombardment, and the freshness of the havoc seemed to accentuate its cruelty. We wandered down the street behind the hotel to the graceful Gothic church of St. Eloi, of which one aisle had been shattered; then, turning another corner, we came on a poor bourgeois house that had had its whole front torn away.
Thus we could see from Dunkirk on the sea to Lille, that fair city, well inland in northern France, and could follow the battle line from Pilken beyond Ypres to La Bassee. In that line we could actually see the flashes and shell bursts in Ypres, St. Eloi, Wytschaete and near Levantie. It was a wonderful day, and a view never to be forgotten.
His history is an interesting one, and his achievement and rise in life was very remarkable in the period in which he lived. Eloi was a workman in Limoges, as a youth, under the famous Abho, in the sixth century; there he learned the craft of a goldsmith. He was such a splendid artisan that he soon received commissions for extensive works on his own account.
Merville is a staunch compact little town with a big church whose lofty byzantine, rounded dome projected high into the air forms a landmark that can be seen for miles. We have been able to pick up this tower quite easily from a point in Belgium fourteen miles away a point from which we were actually watching the bombardment of our lines at St. Eloi on the 10th of June 1916.
The goldsmith ran after the cow, which recked little of their loves. But she was seized by the horns, and held in the grasp of Claude as in an iron vice. For a trifle he would have hurled her into the air. "Farewell, dearest. If you go into the city, come to my house, near St. Leu. I am called Master Anseau, and am the goldsmith of our seigneur, the king of France, at the sign of St. Eloi.
'By the shrine of Saint Eloi he commenced to swear. 'Nay, lie not, she cut him short. 'You love Kat Howard and six other wenches. I know it well. What said Privy Seal? He meditated again to protest that he loved not Katharine, but her quiet stolidity set him to change his mind.
On March 28th the Royal Fusiliers and the Northumberland Fusiliers the old Fighting Fifth captured six hundred yards of German trenches near St.-Eloi and asked for trouble, which, sure enough, came to them who followed them. Their attack was against a German stronghold built of earth and sand-bags nine feet high, above a nest of trenches in the fork of two roads from St.-Eloi to Messines.
Eloi had been was nothing but a barren waste. Not a sign of a house or any part of a house was visible; not a brick remained and even the roads, the fine stone-paved roads, had been obliterated. Where had been hedges or trees there was nothing but a desolate expanse of mud which, from a distance, appeared to be a smooth level plain.
The expedition proceeded towards the island of St. Eloi, near the shores of which two or three hundred savages were encamped in tents. They proved to be Hurons and Algonquins who were on their way to Quebec to join Champlain's expedition to the territory of the Iroquois. Their chiefs were named Iroquet and Ochateguin, and Champlain explained to them the object of his voyage.
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