On the
first the road was tolerable to Ypres, though near the city I was nearly
blown off my bicycle by the fire of a concealed battery of 75's. The
houses at the point where the Rue de Lille enters the Square had been
blown to bits. The Cloth Hall had barely been touched. In its glorious
dignity it was beautiful.

Beyond Ypres, on the Hooge Road, I first experienced the extreme
neighbourhood of a "J.J." It fell about 90 yards in front of me and 20
yards off the road. It makes a curiously low droning sound as it falls,
like the groan of a vastly sorrowful soul in hell,--so I wrote at the
time: then there's a gigantic rushing plunk and overwhelming crash as if
all the houses in the world were falling.

On the way back the road, which had been fairly greasy, became
practically impassable. I struggled on until my lamp failed (sheer
carelessness--I ought to have seen to it before starting), and a gale
arose which blew me all over the road. So I left my motor-bicycle safely
behind a cottage, and started tramping back to H.Q. by the light of my
pocket flash-lamp. It was a pitch-black night. I was furiously hungry,
and stopped at the first inn and gorged coffee with rum, and a large
sandwich of bread and butter and fat bacon. I had barely started
again--it had begun to pour--when a car came along with a French
staff-officer inside. I stopped it, saying in hurried and weighty tones
that I was carrying an important despatch (I had nothing on me, I am
afraid, but a trifling bunch of receipts), and the rest of the way I
travelled lapped luxuriously in soft furs.

The second time I rode along a frozen road between white fields. All the
shells sounded alarmingly near. The noise in Ypres was terrific. At my
destination I came across some prisoners of the Prussian Guard, fierce
and enormous men, nearly all with reddish hair, very sullen and rude.

From accounts that have been published of the first battle of Ypres, it
might be inferred that the British Army knew it was on the point of
being annihilated. A despatch rider, though of course he does not know
very much of the real meaning of the military situation, has unequalled
opportunities for finding out the opinions and spirit of the men. Now
one of us went to Ypres every day and stopped for a few minutes to
discuss the state of affairs with other despatch riders and with
signal-sergeants. Right through the battle we were confident; in fact
the idea that the line might be broken