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As most of this came between Ypres and Zillebeke, the two Quartermaster Serjeants had a harassing time, and did not reach their bivouacs in Poperinghe until 5-15 the following morning. All through the tour the pounding of "A1" continued, while our only effort at retaliation was a 60 lb. mortar which the Royal Garrison Artillery placed in rear of "50" trench.
Don't you remember the man whose wife was English, and how I wrote a letter for him before he died?" "What will become of the house if you are killed?" "Dear Marie," said Sara Lee, "that is all arranged for. You will send to Poperinghe for your aunt, and she will come until Mrs. Cameron or some one else can come from England. And you will stay on. Will you promise that?"
When first we came to Landrecies the thought of the Frontier as something strong and stark had thrilled us again and again, but the Frontier was feeble and is nothing. A man of Poperinghe told me his brother was professor, his son was serving, his wife and children were "over there." He pointed to the German lines. Of his wife and children he has heard nothing for four months.
After scouting about Poperinghe in the darkness, I discovered a beer tavern with a fair-sized room in which the party might be packed with care, and then, like a pocket patriarch with the children of Israel, I led my ladies on foot to the place of sanctuary and disposed the nuns round the bar, with the reverend mother in the centre of them, having a little aureole round her head from the glamour of the pewter pots.
Early the next morning the battalion paraded again and marched to Abeele, where thirty-eight motor busses that had been brought over from England carried the men with their kits to the eastern outlet of Poperinghe, where we alighted and marched down the famous road to Ypres along which thousands of Canadians marched never to return.
Five nuns who had fled from Eastern Belgium they had come, I think, from a convent near Louvain had taken refuge in the school in Furnes in which we were established. When we were ordered to go to Poperinghe, they begged to be allowed to accompany us, and we took them with us in the ambulances.
The big cobbled square; the brooding, silent churches, the single military policeman standing near his sand-bagged sentry-box and in the distance the rumble of a wagon going past the station such was Poperinghe as Vane saw it that evening. A city of ghosts deserted and empty, and as the old grey mare walked sedately through the square. Vane felt that he understood the dead airman's smile.
It was at this time paying particular attention to the Square in Poperinghe, the little station and the hospital there, and it had become such a diabolical nuisance that it was determined to resort to heroic measures to "get it."
I met Gaulter of the King's Own on the same job. He said that he was not looking forward to the push. His battalion are at present in camp near Poperinghe Station. In the push they will be the right rear battalion of Stockwell's Brigade. After my bath I made one or two purchases in Poperinghe and then had tea there.
While we were having breakfast shells were bursting three or four hundred yards away from our hut, and we could hear occasional H.E. dropping as far back as Poperinghe behind us. I set off up the road with another officer to the city where my unit is stationed. We got a lift in a motor as far as a town half-way.
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