Her whole stock-in-trade was what I had seen through the window. She was cheerful enough, though she huddled for warmth over a fire by which sat a despondent-looking brother. She chatted laconically about the situation, and told me she had been there continuously throughout the fighting. The shell that hit the building was a shrapnel and came a month before. Shells still came near, now and again, but that fact seemed to be accepted by her as inevitable and not to be worried about. These people had no means of existence except the sale of their pitiable bits of provisions. They were in daily danger of their lives. Yet they stayed on—odd folk. Typical Belgians.
The gun-fire dropped, then began again spasmodically. I could hear the snipers at work. In the gathering twilight the rattle of rifle fire and the storm of the rapid-fire guns sounded clearly on the left. A fusillade on the right reminded me that the Ypres position was a salient. Directly in front, down that Menin Road, which had seen the taking of so many tens of thousands of lives during the past months, a roll of rifle fire made waves of sound.
Night fell, cold and damp. The making of a light was not permitted; so I waited in the dark, watching the night lights rise and fall over the trenches, until the General and Colonel Home returned, when we ran back to Ypres for dinner.
My first four days in Ypres were uneventful. On the fifth, I went up into the trenches, and saw more of actual trench conditions than I had seen for some time.
Our daily round led me out on the Menin Road, well towards Hooge, or to Potijze on the Zonnebeke Road, several times each day. Shells went over us now and again. Rarely did a day pass when the Huns did not bombard the railway station in Ypres. As we were quartered in the eastern edge of the town the shells aimed at the station bothered us but little. Sometimes a Black Maria lit on the moat wall, where we walked at times, but we timed our exercise so that our promenade and the arrival of the big shells never coincided. Once or twice bits of shell fell over the Headquarters buildings, or rattled down on our paved courtyard, but rarely.
Every morning saw Ypres wrapped in a snow mantle, which was turned before noontide, to a coverlet of black mud. No fires were allowed, except small wood blazes in the open, as smoke from a chimney would have invited a shell.
One day I was searching for a shop where bolts could, once upon a time, be purchased. As I was going down the Rue de Lille, half a dozen shells fell near. One demolished a house but fifty yards ahead. I took shelter in a doorway, and as I did so a Belgian of woebegone appearance, his most characteristic feature a pair of sad, drooping, yellow moustachios, ambled past me down the roadway, pushing a wheelbarrow. On it were three tiny tots, all under four years old. They cuddled together for warmth. One, round-eyed, at the crash of the howitzer shells, was hard at work with a nursing bottle. I warned the Belgian of impending danger, but he stolidly trudged on. Luckily, no more shells came for a time.
The Menin Road proper was never healthy. I spent as little time on it as consistent with the proper performance of my work. I never sat for an hour in its vicinity, waiting for the General, that some shell did not fall near it.
One afternoon shrapnel fell for an hour near a fork on the Menin Road, which all sensible men gave a wide berth to when convenient. Fifteen minutes after the bombardment died down, a procession filed by the fork, headed for a graveyard in the direction of Hooge. A white-robed boy, with red-tasselled black cap, led the way, bearing a cross. Behind him came a robed priest, then an ancient, dilapidated, one-horse hearse containing a rude, black coffin. A score of mourners, one or two of them men, the rest women and children, dressed in their poor best, brought up the rear.
I wondered that they ventured down that shell-swept highway. Yet many such pathetic little processions passed along that road in those days.
I saw one cortège wait for a cessation of the shelling, then proceed slowly over the ground that had but a few minutes before been peppered with bits of shell. It was an odd sight. A tiny lad trotted in front under a large wooden cross painted purple. A quartette of little boys behind him bore a rude unpainted sort of stretcher, apparently improvised from the nearest bits of shattered timber to hand. The coffin, resting upon this frame, was covered with a dingy white sheet. A mother, bowed and feeble, followed the coffin. A few youths and a handful of little girls formed the straggling cortège, tramping over the snow-covered cobbles, their eyes downcast and red.
Death was no stranger in Ypres in those days, but still the Belgians stayed on.
The wall of a ruined building, across the road from the Cloth Hall, fell one morning with a loud crash. A column of dust arose. That many were not injured was surprising. One woman was killed and a couple of passing French soldiers hurt, but post-card vendors were exhibiting their wares under an adjacent wall, equally dangerous, an hour later.
General de Lisle went personally over the whole of the line held by his Division. The 1st Cavalry Brigade was in the front trenches for the first five days, the 2nd Brigade in reserve. Then the 2nd Brigade took over the trenches and the 1st Brigade came back, for the second five days, to the dug-outs.
At points in the line the trenches were knee-deep and sometimes even waist-deep with cold mud and water. The amount of manual labour required to get them into better shape was enormous. New trenches had to be dug, the old parapets strengthened, the trenches drained, and all the while certain mining work must be pushed on at a rapid rate. In some parts of the line the parapets of sandbags had become so thin that a Mauser bullet could plough through them easily. The German snipers were at one place only thirty yards distant.
The drainage of the worst bits of trench, and the laying of a sort of corduroy road from point to point, soon made the trenches much more habitable.
De Lisle was most thorough. Only a couple of casualties occurred when the 1st Brigade "took over," in spite of the constant sniping. Careful preparations of foot baths and relays of dry socks saved the Division from the epidemic of "foot-casualties," from which some other divisions had suffered heavily. A dozen casualties per day were inevitable from shells and snipers. Those who had to "go up" with food and ammunition had to cross a dangerous zone, a certain toll being taken day and night, in some localities.
Inspecting the trench-line, when the Division had occupied it but the night before, was a precarious business. De Lisle and General Briggs were going over the ground when a German sniper but fifteen to twenty yards distant opened fire. Lieutenant Bell-Irving, General Briggs' A.D.C., received a nasty wound in the hip. He fell in the deep mud. Colonel "Tommy" Pitman, of the 11th Hussars, jumped out into the centre of the trench, and strove to lift Bell-Irving clear, and get him behind the protection of a transept. The bullets flew about the Colonel, two cutting clean through his clothing, one on either side of his body, but he escaped unhurt, and pulled Bell-Irving into safety.
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But the trouble was by no means over. A sharp fire was kept up by the Hun snipers, which prevented the removal of Bell-Irving to the dressing station. Captain Moriarty of the R.A.M.C. came up at considerable risk, and advised that the wounded officer be brought back at the earliest possible moment.
There were no means of doing this save to construct a traverse of sandbags, behind which Bell-Irving could be carried. The work must be done under the heavy sniping fire. The troopers of the 11th Hussars at once set about the work with a will, and soon accomplished it, but not before a private had been killed and a sergeant wounded by the German marksmen.
That night a bombing party "cleared out" the district near that transept, and made the snipers' point of vantage untenable.
Each night a splendid pyrotechnic display showed the curved outlines of the Salient. The German trench lights were far superior to ours. Each night, too, Ypres was full of French or