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"As I think," said the canon, "you will find my lord duke either in the shipyard of Barfleur, or the shooting-ground of archers at Valognes hard by." It was then to Valognes, beyond the river Douve, that we were next to ride, and we would pass on the way my uncle's castle of St Sauveur, where mine ancestors had been settled since they were lords of the Bessin.
Looking at what you can see of this village from the Douve farm, it looks exceedingly pretty and attractive. A splendid old church tower could be seen between the trees, and round about it were clustered the red roofs of a fair-sized village. It has, to my mind, a very nice situation. In the days before the war it must have been a pleasing place to live in. I went to have a look at it one day.
As I walked back to the Douve farm at night, nearly always alone, I used to keep on exploring the wide tract of land that lay behind our trenches. "I'll have a look at that old cottage up on the right to-night," I used to say to myself, and later, when the time came for me to walk back from the trenches, I would go off at a new angle across the plain, and make for my objective.
Thence returning to the wood we sampled White Lodge, the Warwick's home under the steep wooded bluff of Hill 63, where the rats made merry among the dirt and unburied food; also La Plus Douce, a pastoral but dangerous spot, where the Douve flowed muddily amidst neglected water-meadows stretching along to Wulverghem with its battered church tower showing among the trees.
We did this, and at last could dimly discern the line of the trenches in front. We were now on the extreme right of the section we had to control, close to the River Douve, and away to the left ran the whole line of our trenches. Along the whole length of this line the business of taking over from the old battalion was being enacted.
The trenches ran along low ground between the wood and the River Douve; on the left the famous hill of Messines peered into our positions, and though itself barely 200 feet above sea-level loomed like a mountain among the mole-heaps of Flanders. The distance between the opposing lines varied from 450 to 250 yards. The amenities of trench life depend almost wholly on the enemy and the weather.
I left the church, and looked about some of the other houses, but none proved as pathetically interesting as the church and the vicar's house, so I took my way out across the fields again towards the Douve farm. Not a soul about anywhere. Wulverghem lay there, empty, wrecked and deserted.
Each morning, with hardly ever a miss, they shelled our trenches, but almost invariably in the same place: the left-hand end. The difference between St. Yvon and this place was, however, that here they always shelled with "heavies." Right back at the Douve farm a mile away, the thundering crash of one of these shells would rattle all the windows and make one say, "Where did that one go?"
We first relieved a battalion of the Middlesex on June 28th opposite a poisonous little spot known as "la Petite Douve." Here a small stream, dignified by the name of the Douve River, wandered lazily across the flat at the foot of the Messines Ridge and coiled like a natural moat in front of the Petite Douve Farm. This, like all farms in Flanders, was a square of strongly-built brick buildings.
All round that neighbourhood it seemed to have been the fashion, past and present, to use the largest shells. In going along the Douve one day, I made a point of measuring and examining several of the holes. I took a photograph of one, with my cap resting on one side of it, to show the relative proportion and give an idea of the size. It was about fourteen feet in diameter, and seven feet deep.
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