e and
look at the enemy's trenches. But under the circumstances I declined.
I felt that it was time to move on and get hence. The honour of being
the only woman who had got to the front at Ypres began to weigh heavy
on me. I mentioned the passing of time and the condition of the roads.

So at last I got into the car. The officers of the battery bowed, and
the men, some fifty of them, gave me three rousing cheers. I think of
them now, and there is a lump in my throat. They were so interested,
so smiling and cheery, that bright late February afternoon, standing
in the mud of the battlefield of Ypres, with German shells bursting
overhead. Half of them, even then, had been killed or wounded. Each
day took its toll of some of them, one way or another.

How many of them are left to-day? The smiling officer, so debonair, so
proud of his hidden battery, where is he? The tiny bridge, has it run
red this last week? The watchman in the tree, what did he see, that
terrible day when the Germans got across the canal and charged over
the flat lands?

The Germans claim to have captured guns at or near this place. One
thing I am sure of: This battery or another, it was not taken while
there were men belonging to it to defend it. The bridge would run red
and the water under the bridge, the muddy field be strewn with bodies,
before those cheery, cool-eyed and indomitable French gunners would
lose their guns.

The car moved away, fifty feet, a hundred feet, and turned out to
avoid an ammunition wagon, disabled in the road. It was fatal. We slid
off into the mire and settled down. I looked back at the battery. A
fresh shell was bursting high in the air.

We sat there, interminable hours that were really minutes, while an
orderly and the chauffeur dug us out with spades. We conversed of
other things. But it was a period of uneasiness on my part. And, as if
to point the lesson and adorn the tale, away to the left, rising above
the plain, was the church roof with the hole in it--mute evidence that
even the mantle of righteousness is no protection against a shell.

Our course was now along a road just behind the trenches and
paralleling them, to an anti-aircraft station.

I have seen a number of anti-aircraft stations at the front: English
ones near the coast and again south of Ypres; guns mounted, as was
this French battery, on the plain of a battlefield; isolated cannon in
towers and on the tops of buildings and water tanks. I have se