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Almost every calibre of gun was being used against us, from the great seventeen inch Austrian siege mortars they were firing at Ypres and Poperinghe behind us, to the nine, seven, six, five, four and three-inch high explosive shells that were filling the air with their fiendish notes.
Poperinghe made up for it. A week without one Jerry aeroplane dropping an experimental bomb or two, without the unpleasant company of Jerry shells and free from apprehensive hours of uncertainty following a gas alarm from forward areas in an unfavourable wind.
Before resuming our hunt for the procureur du roi who, we now found, had removed from Ypres to Poperinghe we entered a restaurant for lunch. It was crowded with French officers, with whom a full-bosomed, broad-hipped Flemish girl exchanged uncouth pleasantries, and it possessed a weird and uncomely boy, who regarded A , the Staff officer accompanying me, with a hypnotic stare.
But as he was a Belgian general, and the town of Ypres is held by the French, it was a part of the etiquette of war that we should secure the escort of a French officer at the town of Poperinghe. For war has its etiquette, and of a most exacting kind. And yet in the end it simplifies things. It is to war what rules are to bridge something to lead by!
Infantry officers walk miles into Poperinghe for their tea and then find the room crowded with those young subalterns who supply us with our bully. They bring in bulldogs and stay a long time. Dickebusch used to be a favourite Sunday afternoon's ride for the Poperinghe wheelers.
Having served for two years abroad I applied for a month's leave it was a privilege granted to Staff Officers who needed a rest. My leave warrant reached me on January 5, and next day I left Watou and entrained at Poperinghe for Boulogne. When I returned to Ypres on February 8, 1918, I found that some very drastic changes had taken place in the grouping of battalions.
And we knew that while we gazed the roads from the doomed city to Locre and Poperinghe were choked with a terror-stricken stream of fugitives, ancient men hobbling upon sticks, aged women clutching copper pans, and stumbling under the weight of feather-beds, while whimpering children fumbled among their mothers' skirts.
There was a mess cart awaiting me at the station; and in it I jogged along to the Transport Lines which were in the vicinity of Brandhoek a mile or so further on on the left of the road from Poperinghe to Ypres.
But when all is said and done, one is bound to look at the result. On October 21, the day after our arrival at Proven, I went to the Fifth Army H.Q. to get all the maps and information I could relating to the new front. The Army H.Q. were in a large château north of Poperinghe, and when I got there I was received by the Colonel in charge of Intelligence with every kindness.
Ypres was approachable from Poperinghe by one road only, along which came almost all the supplies for the troops in the Salient. From a point on the road called Shrapnel Crossing to the city it was within convenient range of the enemy artillery, and being well aware that the road was much used at night, the enemy subjected it to considerable fire, and caused casualties nightly.
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