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I have told of my first day, when I visited the front trenches, saw the work of 'Mother, and finally that marvellous spectacle, the Ypres Salient at night.
I retired with some haste from Flanders the night after the Germans first began to use gas. Militant chemistry may have altered the British soldier's convictions. I have left out the usual monotonous epithet. Any soldier can supply it. To these may now be added St Eloi, Hill 60, the Second Battle of Ypres.
So little advancing was there that the mules, so far as this Battalion was concerned, were never used, and the loaders and leaders, thanks to their function proving illusory, escaped all share in the fighting. If Poperinghe and Ypres had quite borne out their reputations I should not here remark on either of them.
I proclaimed instantly and loudly that I was as brave as a lion; that I did not know fear. He smiled. But when the interview was over it was arranged that I should have a permis de séjour to stay in Dunkirk, and that on the following day the general himself and one of his officers having an errand in that direction would take me to Ypres.
In order to enforce these motives with further terrors, he himself took the field very early in the spring; and after threatening Luxembourg, Mons, and Namur he suddenly sat down before Ghent and Ypres, and in a few weeks made himself master of both places.
At the same time the bishops of Bruges and Ypres, the high bailiffs of Ghent and Courtrai, the governor of Oudenarde, and other important magistrates, were arrested accused of complicity with the duke, but of what particular offence the lawless demagogues did not deign to specify.
It was in June and July, 1915, that the Germans displayed their main efforts in the Argonne. The heroism of the French barred the way. At Arras in June, there was almost as much activity as at Ypres. During the last part of the campaign in the Artois, General d'Urbal began an advance between Hebuterne and Serre. The former had been held by the French and the latter by the Germans.
We reached the ambulance in Ypres between dusk and dark; it was light enough to see that the front of the building, which had been intact earlier in the afternoon, had been already scarred with pieces of flying shells. The shutters which had been closed were torn and splintered, and the brick work was pitted with shrapnel.
Artevelde, with the consuls of Bruges and Ypres, was awaiting him there.
One day the Canadians were to lift their feet out of the mire of the Ypres salient and take the high, dry road to the Somme front, and anyone with a whit of chivalry in his soul would have rejoiced to know that they were to have their part in the big movement of Sept. 15th. But let us consider other things and other fighting before we come to the taking of Courcelette.
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