shells had poured on Ypres for six hours without cessation, my regiment
left the town, and we went out a mile or two to take over some trenches.

"A month later my duty took me back to Ypres, and I found myself walking
up the Rue Bar-le-Duc towards the little antique shop. Overhead the
shells whistled without cessation. It was now a city of the dead--one
could not realize that it was the same pleasant little town where I had
met with so strange an experience a few weeks back. Men, children and
horses were lying dead in every gutter.

"In due course I arrived at the shop. A large hole had been ripped in
the _pave_ road before the door, and I had to step over a dead and
twisted soldier to gain an entrance. Of course the place was empty.
Ombos, Albertus Magnus and all the wonderful contents of the spacious
old rooms had disappeared. I made a search of the house, and it was not
without a curious sensation in my heart that I entered the room where
the Master of Masters had towered in his niche. Silence--only the faint
boom of a gun far away in the French trenches--awful, ghastly silence.
Then a deafening roar and a falling of masonry as Krupp's marked down
another house in the town of sorrow. The horror of it!

"I turned dismally away, out into the Rue Bar-le-Duc, and along the
square. A few scattered lights shone feebly through the evening mist,
and over towards the Norman bridge the yellow flames from a burning
house lit up the sky with a lurid glow. At nearly every street corner
little groups of civilians had collected and were talking and
gesticulating in a terrified manner. When a big shell came with a
hoarse, rattling noise through the air, like a racing motor cycle on the
track at Brooklands, they would rush into their homes, panic-smitten. If
death winked, and passed them over, out they would creep again. And so
they lived in an inferno of shells for weeks on end.

"An ambulance wagon overturned in the middle of the road attracted my
attention. I could not repress a shudder as I looked on the
shell-shattered wreck.... It was the old type of four-horse ambulance
used by the army in South Africa; possibly it had jolted into the
shell-swept death-trap of Spion Kop, or carried men into the reeking
enteric camps of Ladysmith. Well, it had made its last journey this
time! The four dead horses had not been cut away from the traces, and
from underneath the huddled and twisted heap stuck out an arm, and in
the hand was c