clearing station, and scores of times when I passed it I saw it crowded with the “walking wounded,” who had trudged down from the fighting-line, taking eleven hours, fourteen hours sometimes, to get so far. They were no longer “cheerful” like the gay lads who came lightly wounded out of earlier battles, glad of life, excited by their luck. They were silent, shivering, stricken men; boys in age, but old and weary in the knowledge of war. The slime of the battlefields had engulfed them. Their clothes were plastered to their bodies. Their faces and hands were coated with that whitish clay. Their steel hats and rifles were caked with it. Their eyes, brooding, were strangely alive in those corpselike figures of mud who huddled round charcoal stoves or sat motionless on wooden forms, waiting for ambulances. Yet they were stark in spirit still.

“Only the mud beat us,” they said. Man after man said that.

“We should have gone much farther except for the mud.”

Along the Menin road there were wayside dressing stations for wounded, with surgeons at work, and I saw the same scenes there. They were not beyond the danger zone. Doctors and orderlies were killed by long-range shells. Wounded were wounded again or finished off. Some ambulances were blown to bits. A colonel who had been standing in talk with a doctor was killed halfway through a sentence.

There was never a day in which Ypres was not shelled by long-range high velocities which came howling overhead as I heard them scores of times in passing through those ruins with gas-mask at the alert, according to orders, and steel hat strapped on, and a deadly sense of nostalgia because of what was happening in the fields of horror that lay beyond. Yet to the soldier farther up the Menin road Ypres was sanctuary and God’s heaven.

The little old town of Cassel on the hill⁠—where once a Duke of York marched up and then marched down again⁠—was beyond shell-range, though the enemy tried to reach it and dropped twelve-inch shells (which make holes deep enough to bury a coach and horses) round its base. There is an inn there⁠—the Hôtel du Sauvage⁠—which belongs now to English history, and Scottish and Irish and Welsh and Australian and Canadian. It was the last place along the road to Ypres where men who loved life could get a dinner sitting with their knees below a tablecloth, with candlelight glinting in glasses, while outside the windows the flickering fires of death told them how short might be their tarrying in the good places of the world. This was a good place where the blinds were pulled down by Madame, who understood. Behind the desk was Mademoiselle Suzanne, “a dainty rogue in porcelain,” with wonderfully bright eyes and just a little greeting of a smile for any young officer who looked her way trying to get that greeting, because it was ever so long since he had seen a pretty face and might be ever so long again. Sometimes it was a smile met in the mirror against the wall, to which Suzanne looked to touch her curls and see, like the Lady of Shalott, the pictures of life that passed. A man would tilt his chair to get that angle of vision. Outside, on these nights of war, it was often blusterous, very dark, wet with heavy rain. The door opened, and other officers came in with waterproofs sagging round their legs and top-boots muddy to the tags, abashed because they made pools of water on polished boards.

Pardon, Madame.

Ça ne fait rien, Monsieur.

There was a klip-klop of horses’ hoofs in the yard. I thought of D’Artagnan and the Musketeers who might have ridden into this very yard, strode into this very room, on their way to Dunkirk or Calais. Madame played the piano remarkably well, classical music of all kinds, and any accompaniment to any song. Our young officers sang. Some of them touched the piano with a loving touch and said, “Ye gods, a piano again!” and played old melodies or merry ragtime. Before Passchendaele was taken a Canadian boy brought a fiddle with him, and played last of all, after other tunes, “The Long, Long Trail,” which his comrades sang.

“Come and play to us again,” said Madame.

“If I come back,” said the boy.

He did not come back along the road through Ypres to Cassel.

From the balcony one could see the night-birds fly. On every moonlight night German raiders were about bombing our camps and villages. One could see just below the hill how the bombs crashed into St.-Marie Capelle and many hamlets where British soldiers lay, and where peasants and children were killed with them. For some strange reason Cassel itself was never bombed.

“We are a nest of spies,” said some of the inhabitants, but others had faith in a miraculous statue, and still others in Sir Herbert Plumer.

Once when a big shell burst very close I looked at Mademoiselle Suzanne behind the desk. She did not show fear by the flicker of an eyelid, though officers in the room were startled.

Vous n’avez pas peur, même de la mort?” (“You are not afraid, even of death?”) I asked.

She shrugged her shoulders.

Je m’en fiche de la mort!” (“I don’t care a damn for death!”)

The Hôtel du Sauvage was a pleasant rendezvous, but barred for a time to young gentlemen of the air force, who lingered too long there sometimes and were noisy. It was barred to all officers for certain hours of the day without special permits from the A.P.M., who made trouble in granting them. Three Scottish officers rode down into Cassel. They had ridden down from hellfire to sit at a table covered with a tablecloth, and drink tea in a room again. They were refused permission, and their language to me about the A.P.M. was unprintable. They desired his blood and bones. They raised their hands to heaven

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