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The first lists of the killed had come out and contained the names of many of my personal friends, and the sense of a great pride in the achievements of one division was marred by the sorrow for their loss. The town of Poperinge was now deserted. Travelling in that direction one morning I met streams of refugees coming from it and on entering it found it like a city of the dead.
About ten o'clock that night my friend, Captain Eddie Robertson, standing with his regiment on the roadside ten miles nearer Poperinge, waiting for orders to advance, noticed a youth with a little old lady on his back, trudging by in the stream of fleeing refugees. Wieltze was a picture; the kind of moving picture that the movie man would pay thousands for, but never can obtain.
Our laboratory had been given permission to keep a check on the purity of the water supply of the Canadians; hence this trip from our laboratory, located twenty miles away in another part of the line. The cobble stone or pavé road between Poperinge and Ypres was like a moving picture to our, as yet, unsatiated eyes.
The Canadians had lost heavily but as yet no accurate figures were obtainable on account of the complicated nature of the fighting and the fact that the wounded were going through several ambulances. We did not stay any longer than was necessary to obtain the news and our return trip to Poperinge was a record one.
As we could not be of use, we reluctantly passed on out of the fighting zone toward home, and the refugees being not so numerous we could travel faster. Near the entrance to Poperinge a British Major came over to our car as we were showing our passes to a military policeman. "Are you Canadian officers?" he said. "We are," I answered.
At Poperinge we saw a cart on the road beside a house which had been recently blown down by a shell. As we drove slowly by, a wounded old woman was carried out and laid beside the bodies of two other white-haired women who had just been dug out of the ruins.
The military policeman on the road at the outskirts of Poperinge on being queried said, "All right, no shells to-day in Pop." But we got only about 150 yards into the town when there was a terrific hair-raising explosion near us, followed by showers of bricks and bits of whizzing shell.
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