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The Boche knew quite well the time that vast and apparently never ending chain of traffic would be wending its nightly way from Poperinghe to Ypres. He shelled the great high road systematically every night. Every night some of those gallant men would go never to return. It seemed marvellous that so many could escape the destruction which was hurled at them; but war is full of wonders.
Holland came here to-day, and told me some humorous sides of his experiences with ambulances. One man from the Church Army marched in, and said: "I am a Christian and you are not. I come here for petrol, and I ask it, not for the Red Cross, but in the name of Christ." Another man came dashing in, and said: "I want to go to Poperinghe. I was once there before, and the mud was beastly.
One of them announced the death of Henry James; and all through that wonderful day, when we watched a German counter-attack in the Ypres salient from one of the hills southeast of Poperinghe, the ruined tower of Ypres rising from the mists of the horizon, the news was intermittently with me as a dull pain, breaking in upon the excitement and novelty of the great spectacle around us.
To-day I lunched on the barge with Miss Close, and we took her car and drove to Poperinghe. I hardly like to write this even in a diary, I am so seldom naughty! But I really did something very wrong for once. And the amusing part of it was that military orders made going to Poperinghe so impossible that no one molested us!
But here we were doomed to disappointment, for not a chair was vacant "Not room for a flea," as Madame explained to us, and we had to curb our appetites as best we could. The tea shop at Poperinghe! Where could you hope to find a more popular spot than was the tea shop in the early part of 1915?
"Happy" George, his comrades all called him, for he was worshipped by his men as he always wore a smile. No man ever saw a frown on the captain's face. Lieut.-Colonel Boyle had made the supreme sacrifice at the head of the 10th. Major Maclaren of the same battalion had been wounded in the charge at St. Julien Wood and was killed outright by a shell in the ambulance on the way to Poperinghe.
But it is a fine looking old town and would be worth visiting in more peaceful times. We left Rouen again at night and wandered along in the same dilatory fashion, arriving at Hazebrouck and eventually at Poperinghe. The latter was railhead for the Ypres Salient.
Here were the children playing by the roadside, and the cattle slowly wending their way home, and ten miles away we could hear the roar of the guns, and knew that on those wasted fields men were struggling with savage fury in one of the bloodiest battles of the war. In the great square of Poperinghe the scene was brilliant in the extreme.
On the eighteenth, Guynemer poured a broadside, at close quarters, into a two-seated machine above Staden; and on the twentieth, flying this time on his old Vieux-Charles, he destroyed a D.F.W. in a quick fight above Poperinghe.
He closed with an eloquent peroration in which he said that, although our little bit is only part of very large operations, our holding the Gravenstafel Ridge may help to end the war and sway the destiny of the world! In the afternoon I went into Poperinghe. It was extremely hot. I had a cold bath at the Divisional Baths and felt very refreshed by it.
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