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Updated: June 18, 2025
Round about Poperinghe, by Reninghelst and Locre, long convoys of motor-wagons, taking up a new day's rations from the rail-heads, raised clouds of dust which powdered the hedges white. Flemish cart-horses with huge fringes of knotted string wended their way between motor-lorries and gun-limbers.
But it may be only a blind." As we turned out into the darkened street to make our way to our respective offices a supply column rumbled over the pavé, each of the seventy-two motor-lorries keeping its distance like the ships of a fleet. Despatch-riders with blue and white armlets whizzed past on their motor-bicycles, and high overhead was the loud droning hum of the aeroplane going home to roost.
There was a rumbling of guns a long way to north of us, and that was all. The Boche had undoubtedly stolen away. For a long time the only sound was the warning shout, passed from front to rear, that told of shell-holes in the roadway. On the outskirts of the village we saw signs of the Hun evacuation: deserted huts and stables, a couple of abandoned motor-lorries.
We wanted sleepers, rails, and locomotives for the railway; pipes, pumps, and other materials for the water-supply; waggons, motor-lorries and light-cars for transport purposes; sand-carts, cacolets, and ambulances for the R.A.M.C.; and, with the exception of most kinds of vegetables, food. All this had to be brought overseas.
Outside was the clink and clatter of the column, the pitiful curses of tired men, the groaning roar of the motor-lorries as they toiled up the slope. Then the Staff began to wander in one by one on foot, exhausted and bedraggled. They loved the coffee, but only played with the chicken I admit it was tough. They thought all was lost and the General killed.
In this area alone, eighty-seven guns of various calibres, and fully a thousand horse and oxen-drawn vehicles, nearly a hundred motor-lorries, cars, field-kitchens, water carts, and a mass of other impedimenta blocked the road, with the carcases of thousands of animals and the bodies of dead Turks and Germans."
British motor-lorries and ambulances crowding the little place and aligned along the avenues. British faces, British voices, everywhere. The blue uniform and blue helmet of a French soldier seemed as incongruous though as welcome as in London.
It had rejoiced in many public institutions that were turned into hospitals and offices; the wounded limped its wide, dusty streets, detachments of Infantry went through it swiftly; and utterly bored motor-lorries cruised up and down roaring, I suppose, for something to look at or to talk to.
"I had my wound dressed here and also had an anti-tetanous inoculation put into me. I did not like it! "Then Francis and I got into a motor-ambulance and were motored away, through Poperinghe, to Watou. We passed what I assumed to be Nugent's 36th Division coming up in motor-lorries to relieve the 55th Division.
The Belgian Government very kindly lent us a couple of big motor-lorries in which to take out our stores, and with our own motors we made quite a procession as we started off from the wharf of Dunkirk on our fifteen-mile drive to Furnes. It was late in the afternoon when we reached our new home.
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