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The going from Beaumetz, through shell-shattered villages, by roads twisting up and down long hills, commenced to tell on the men long before the first halt was due. Breathing became, in many cases, long and heavy; some stumbled blindly forward with heads strained down, and others impotently cursed at the Higher Command for not calling a halt.
The officers we came to see were out and we seized the opportunity to run over for a look at the shell-shattered town of Laventie the first battered town we had seen. To us, at that time, it was an awe-inspiring spectacle, though nowadays it would be considered a comparatively undamaged town.
On January 4th Donoghue sent "E" Company back to occupy and help strengthen the old position at the river, from where they sent detachments forward to help "K" and "M.G." and trench mortar hold the shell-shattered village of Kodish.
Pulling up at a shell-shattered village we left the car and trudged along a shell-torn road, along a battered and rusty railway line, and presently struck into a desolate waste intersected by sparse hedgerows and with here and there desolate, leafless trees, many of which, in shattered trunk and broken bough, showed grim traces of what had been; and ever as we advanced these ugly scars grew more frequent, and we were continually dodging sullen pools that were the work of bursting shells.
The French curtain of fire had checked their further advance, according to a special correspondent of the Chicago Herald, and a savage countercharge in the afternoon had gained for the defenders a corpse-strewn welter of splintered trees and shell-shattered ground that had been the southern corner of the wood.
A slight hillock stood between this field and the firing-line where now lively fusillades were being exchanged its profile crowned with a spectral rank of shell-shattered poplars sharply silhouetted against a sky in which star-shells and Verey lights flowered like blooms of hell.
An advance upon two German colliery positions adjoining the Grassier to the northwest, earlier in the night, also involved stiff hand-to-hand fighting. About the Grassier were numerous shell-shattered buildings, many of which had been strongly fortified by the Germans. The Canadians bombed their way systematically through these defenses, silencing the machine guns and clearing out the defenders.
Men had told us that, unlike the rest of the front near the trenches, there were no growing crops, and no birds sang in that desolate, dreary, shell-shattered area, and we wanted to see it for ourselves. We were surprised and delighted to find Captain Scrimger, whom we had left convalescing at Bulford, England, in charge of the Advanced Dressing Station.
As we traversed Ypres on our homeward route, a little girl held up bouquets of spring flowers and we stopped while I bought a large bunch of daffodils for the equivalent of two pennies. Crossing the railway tracks by the shell-shattered station we struck into the Dickiebush Bailleul Road, and drove slowly homeward over the rough pavé.
The two drivers of a lorry far behind climbed up a steep, shell-shattered neighbouring bank, and munched bread and bully beef while the afternoon grew to dusk and gun flashes showed like lightning on the angry low winter clouds ahead. "What they want to get us stuck in this flaming mud-hole for?" said the driver to the second driver.
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