With Cavalry in 1915. Frederic Coleman

on the walls of the roofless Grand Gallery in the Cloth Hall were crumbling to bits. My photographs were the last records made of them, for they fell piece by piece not long afterward.

      I watched operations at a French Divisional Headquarters one evening. It was not more than a mile back of the line. Wagons were loading, preparatory to being taken trenchwards at dusk. Timber, thousands on thousands of empty bags, rolls of barbed wire, odd shaped completed wire entanglements, metal shields varying from curved sheet-steel bastions a dozen feet in length to small V-shaped iron castings, all manner of wooden troughs, boxes, stands, supports, periscopes, braziers, rolls of fine wire, boxes of trench bombs and grenades, shovels, picks, and many peculiar tools were among the collection of material that was to find its way to the firing line. I learnt much of the business side of trench warfare that night.

      The supply of ammunition and food and its distribution are most methodically managed by the French.

      Taking up giant powder for mining operation was an item of the day's work. A story was told by one of our sappers, of a couple of Irish troopers who had started across the fields in front of Zillebeke as night was falling, with a good sized load of powder in a box. Shortly after they left Cavan's House shells fell in profusion over the route that they had chosen. Another group started trenchward, carrying various types of grenades. Howitzer shells were falling, front and rear, and shrapnel bursting a few hundred yards away.

      A flash and a crash came from in front.

      "Them fellers with the joynt powder was like to be in that shindy," said a member of the second party. "Close to 'em, it was, sure."

      A moment later they came upon a strange sight. There in the field, just visible in the gathering darkness, sat the box. Behind it reclined the two troopers, snuggling close for cover.

      "What are you doin' in this 'ere peaceful spot, Dan?" questioned one of the second party as they reached the box.

      "Takin' cover the whiles we do a bit of a rest-like," was the reply. "The divils sent wan so clost, it shure jarred the wind out av us, it did."

      And they snuggled closer to the giant powder as he spoke.

      

      Hour by hour I watched the "75's." Their marksmanship was wonderful. The rapidity with which the guns were served was an eye-opener. The French gunners burst shrapnel practically over the heads of our men in the front trenches, to cover the area twenty-five yards beyond them. One trooper swore a French shell, aimed to worry sapping operations by the Huns a short distance in front of our trenches, came so close that it knocked the top sandbag off our parapet. Certain it was that the word was frequently passed to "lie low while the '75's' fire just above us."

      My day to go up to the trenches came at last. My guide was Captain Bretherton, the Staff Captain of the 1st Cavalry Brigade.

       Scenes of battle of olden time in colours on the shattered walls of Ypres Cloth Hall

       face p. 70

       A communication trench leading to the front-line position in the Sanctuary Wood

       face p. 71

      Leaving my car at the "Halte," a point where the railway crosses the Menin Road, and the Zillebeke Road branches off to the south, we were soon slipping, sliding and ploughing along through the muddy fields. We followed no particular pathway, avoiding where possible fields where enemy shells were falling. The rotting mangel-wurzels dotted the ground all about us. Shell-holes in thousands, positions where French or British batteries had made a stand, trenches in lines and circles, and barbed wire entanglements, caught my attention at every step. Sprinkled everywhere were all manner of pieces of projectile—from complete 6-inch German shells, unexploded, to blue shrapnel cartridges, bright-nosed timing fuses, and jagged bits of all shapes and sizes.

      Cavan's House was but a wall, a pile of shapeless bricks and mortar beside it. Cavan's Dug-out, a series of holes in the road bank, roofed with sandbags, held a signal party. Every day a storm of shell visited the spot, and Hun snipers made one wary thereabouts.

      We walked on, up the roadway, our objective the Sanctuary Wood. The bullets sang over us, and shells burst in front with a continuous din. A path led through the scrub. Entering the wood, we passed innumerable little individual funk holes. The trees were in splinters and tatters. Here I saw an abandoned shirt, there a khaki cap. My foot hit against a regulation mess tin, and as it turned I saw a rifle-hole drilled in its bottom. Now we were ankle, now knee, deep in sticky mud. Bullets became more plentiful overhead.

      A turn down a muddy path led us through a last piece of woods, across sloughs of slime, over a creek, up a slight slope, and there we were at General Briggs's Brigade Headquarters. These were a line of dug-outs in the hillside, a corduroy road winding from entrance to entrance. A deep approach trench, looking like a drain, led one hundred and fifty yards further to the front trenches.

      Shells fell all the afternoon on our right and behind us, and the song of the Mauser bullets never ceased. At dusk, I was "safe" back in Ypres.

      On my way back through the woods, shell-smashed, that covered the gentle hills through which the front line trenches ran, I saw a burial party.

      I stopped a moment, and watched the laying to rest of all that was mortal of three troopers who had paid the great price.

      Their comrades placed them reverently in the shallow graves in the soft earth of the hillside, marking each grave with a white wooden cross bearing each hero's name, his rank, and regiment.

      Oh, those rows of rude wooden crosses! What thoughts their memory brings to mind! Gone now, many of them, ploughed under by long months of shell-fire, or trampled under foot by the ebb and flow of battle, as the lines have swept back and forth with the tide of war. Gone, perhaps, from the scarred and mangled hill-sides of Flanders; but never to go altogether from the hearts of those who knew them, and who realised their worth.