uld have somehow
rounded off the day!

IV

Our new passes took us to the top of a hill well known to the few
onlookers of which this war admits. The motor stopped at a point on the
road where a picket was stationed, who examined our papers. Then came a
stiff and muddy climb, past a dugout for protection in case of shelling,
Captain ---- carrying the three gas-helmets. At the top was a flat green
space--three or four soldiers playing football on it!--and an old
windmill, and farm-buildings.

We sheltered behind the great beams supporting the windmill, and looked
out through them, north and east, over a wide landscape; a plain bordered
eastward by low hills, every mile of it, almost, watered by British blood,
and consecrate to British dead. As we reached the windmill, as though in
sombre greeting, the floating mists on the near horizon seemed to part,
and there rose from them a dark, jagged tower, one side of it torn away.
It was the tower of Ypres--mute victim!--mute witness to a crime, that,
beyond the reparations of our own day, history will avenge through years
to come.

A flash!--another!--from what appear to be the ruins at its base. It is
the English guns speaking from the lines between us and Ypres; and as we
watch we see the columns of white smoke rising from the German lines as
the shells burst. There they are, the German lines--along the Messines
ridge. We make them out quite clearly, thanks to a glass and Captain
----'s guidance. Their guns, too, are at work, and a couple of their
shells are bursting on our trenches somewhere between Vlamertinghe and
Dickebusche. Then the rattle of our machine-guns--as it seems from
somewhere close below us, and again the boom of the artillery.

The counter-action is in progress, and we watch what can be seen or
guessed of it, in fascination. We are too far off to see what is actually
happening between the opposing trenches, but one of the chief fields of
past and present battle, scenes which our children and our children's
children will go to visit, lie spread out before us. Half the famous sites
of the earlier war can be dimly made out between us and Ypres. In front of
us is the gleam of the Zillebeke Lake, beyond it Hooge. Hill 60 is in that
band of shadow; a little farther east the point where the Prussian Guard
was mown down at the close of the first Battle of Ypres; farther south the
fields and woods made for ever famous by the charge of the Household
Cavalry, by