y will arrive.

[Page Heading: STORIES OF THE BRITISH FRONT]

I found poor old Alan at the Base Hospital, in terrible pain, poor boy,
but not dangerously wounded. He has been through an awful time, and
nearly all the officers of his regiment have been killed or wounded. For
my part, in spite of his pain, I can thank God that he is out of the
firing-line for a bit. The horror of the war has got right into him, and
he has seen things which few boys of eighteen can have witnessed. Eight
days in the trenches at Ypres under heavy fire day and night is a pretty
severe test, and Alan has behaved splendidly. He told me the most awful
tales of what he had seen, but I believe it did him good to get things
off his chest, so I listened. The thing he found the most ghastly was
the fact that when a trench has been taken or lost the wounded and dying
and dead are left out in the open. He says that firing never ceases, and
it is impossible to reach these men, who die of starvation within sight
of their comrades.

"Sometimes," Alan said, "we see them raise themselves on an arm for an
instant, and they yell to us to come to them, but we can't."

His own wound was received when the Germans "got their range to an
inch" and began shelling their trenches. A whole company next to Alan
was wiped out, and he started to go back to tell his Colonel the trench
could not be held. The communication trench by which he went was not
quite finished, and he had to get out into the open and race across to
where the unfinished trench began again. Poor child, running for his
life! He was badly hit in the groin, but managed just to tumble into the
next bit of the trench, where he found two men who carried him, pouring
with blood, to his Colonel. He was hastily bound up and carried four
miles on crossed rifles to the hospital at Ypres, where his wound was
properly dressed, and after an hour he was put on the train for
Boulogne.

Alan had one story of how he was told to wait at a certain spot with 130
men. "So I waited," he said, "but the fire was awful." His regiment had,
it seems, gone round another way. "I got thirty of the men away," Alan
said, "the rest were killed." It means something to be an officer and a
gentleman.

Every day the list of casualties grows longer, and I wonder who will be
left.

_19 November. Furnes._--Early on Monday, the 16th, I left Boulogne in
Lady Bagot's car and came to Dunkirk, where I was laid up with a cold
for two or