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Updated: May 5, 2025
Omer and made a similar attack on Estaires on March 23. Four days after another attack was made on Estaires, and on the same day, March 27, the German airmen did some damage to Sailly, Calais, and Dunkirk. The next day a "Taube" made an attack on Calais, Estaires, and Hazebrouck. A Zeppelin closed the month's warfare in the air for the Germans by making a dash over Bailleul.
"There will always be a little charity, m'sieur," said one woman, "and at least my children are safe." After the first terror of the invasion those women were calm and showed astounding courage and resignation. It was more than pitiful to see the refugees on the roads from Hazebrouck.
There we filled up with coffee and cognac, while the driver told us of his adventures in Antwerp. We rumbled out of Hazebrouck towards St Omer. It was a clear dawn in splashes of pure colour. All the villages were peaceful, untouched by war. When we came to St Omer it was quite light. All the soldiers in the town looked amateurish.
We took the main road which turns north from Hazebrouck to Caestre. We were going into billets in the war zone. The place where we were to be billeted was just back of the centre of the line held by the British. East, slightly north, was the famous town of Ypres, due east twelve miles was Armentieres, southwest seventeen miles was La Bassee, south was Bethune, fifteen miles away.
He was a tall, thin, lithe old man, with a crumpled wife and prodigiously large family. He was a man of affairs, too, for once a month in peace time he would drive into Hazebrouck. While his wife got me the milk, we used to sit by the fire and smoke our pipes and discuss the terrible war and the newspapers.
Maconochie, the Camp Commandant sighed heavily. "I am a kind of receptacle for the waste products of everybody's mind," he exclaimed petulantly. Then two nuns called and asked me to find a discreet soldier un soldat discret to escort them to Hazebrouck; I told them to take my servant, who is a married man with five children.
This epidemic was not confined to the Battalion, nor to the 61st Division. Isolation camps had hastily to be formed, for the evil threatened to dislocate whole corps and even armies. Among the Germans the same complaint seems to have spread with even greater virulence; indeed, it may well have prevented them from launching a further offensive against Béthune and Hazebrouck.
I reported to the R.T.O. in the square at Hazebrouck, and he gave me instructions to go by the next train to Poperinghe. It was a sultry day and I was glad of a drink. I managed to get one on the station. I could occasionally hear the rumble of the guns in the distance now, but very faint. The train left Hazebrouck at 3.30 p.m. The country looked as calm and peaceful as anything.
They were certainly giving us a trip around the country. At St. Omar we were told we were to go to Hazebrouck, where we arrived about seven in the evening, and the R.T. Officer who kept asking for us came aboard. It was Lieut. Russell who had sat with myself and officers at the St. Andrew's dinner given at the Queen's Hotel, Toronto, in 1913.
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