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Four miles short of Hazebrouck we caught up the rest. Proceeding in single file along the road, we endeavoured not to laugh, for as one despatch rider said it makes all the difference on grease which side of your mouth you put your pipe in. We reached Hazebrouck at midday. Spreading out the manoeuvre had become a fine art we searched the town.
"The big guns rumbled very much and the shells whistled over our heads. Every one heard: 'So-and-so is killed' or 'wounded, by a shell. 'Such-and-such-a-house is ruined by a shell. "After having spent more than seven months in incredible fear, my brothers and myself have left the village, at the order of the gendarmes, and the English took us to Hazebrouck, from where we went to Paris."
The "Chapeau Rouge" was well reported on, and there we lunched. All those tourists who will deluge Flanders after the war should go to the "Chapeau Rouge" in Hazebrouck. There we had lentil soup and stewed kidneys, and roast veal with potatoes and leeks, fruit, cheese, and good red wine. So little was the charge that one of us offered to pay it all.
Through Hazebrouck and numerous small towns we continued our eastward way to Bailleul, stopping there for an hour's rest. Our section happened to be right in the market square so had a good opportunity to see some of the principal points of interest in this famous and ancient city.
It's a dispiriting town, given over to industrial pursuits, and approached by rows of mean little cottages such as you may see on the slopes of the mining valleys of South Wales. And a very gallant and hefty body of men they were. Poperinghe is a dismal place, and to be avoided. Hazebrouck is not without some pretentiousness.
During the four and a half months of that fighting the war correspondents were billeted in the old town of Cassel, where, perched on a hill which looks over a wide stretch of Flanders, through our glasses we could see the sand-dunes beyond Dunkirk and with the naked eyes the whole vista of the battle-line round Ypres and in the wide curve all the countryside lying between Aire and Hazebrouck and Notre Dame de Lorette.
Hazebrouck, for example, is a thoroughly Flemish town, though nearly ten miles, in a beeline, inside the French border Flemish not merely, like Dunkirk, in the architecture of its great brick church, but also actually Flemish in language, and in the names that one reads above its shop doors.
As the evening drew in the train wandered slowly through Lillers and Hazebrouck, vast centres of activity, finally drawing up at Godewaersvelde at 10.45 p.m., whence a weary march ended at dawn at Houtkerque, which, curiously enough, was next door to our first resting place in Flanders, Winnezeele.
Two days before the battalion had marched out of Hazebrouck hospital, leaving a picquet behind to clean up and bring along any stragglers. Thank goodness we were not bothered with many of them, and if it had not been for the bad weather at Salisbury Plains, which accounted for nearly seventy-five good men in the hospitals, we would have had very few weaklings.
Train left Lumbres at 10 a.m. Went through St. Omer, Hazebrouck, and Poperinghe. We got out at Brandhoek, about two miles beyond Poperinghe nearly at Vlamertinghe. Marched to Query Camp. Remained here in tents during the afternoon. The arrangements concerning us seem very vague. Divisional Staff do not appear to have given very definite orders to General Stockwell.
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