as growing late. The star shells became fewer. The search-lights
ceased altogether. In half an hour those keen eyes in distant trees
and steeples would have marked us down--and what good then the agony
of this all-night march? Better to have been killed back there in
Belle-waarde. We were still a good two miles from Ypres town.

The officer literally drove us back over the way we had come. His
orders had anticipated this eventuality so that rather than force
the passage of the barrage fire, merely for a rest, we should rest
here where no rest was to be had. Undoubtedly, if we had been "going
up" it would have been different. We should have gone on--no fire
would have stopped us.

[Illustration: BRITISH WOUNDED WAITING FOR TRANSPORTATION TO A
DRESSING STATION.]

[Illustration: THE PRINCESS PATRICIAS IN BILLETS AT WESTOUTRE,
BELGIUM. ON TOP OF WAGON IN FOREGROUND IS "KNIFE-REST" TYPE OF
WIRE ENTANGLEMENTS.]

The half hour limit brought us to a murky daylight and an old and
sloppy support trench which bordered the track and into which we flung
ourselves, to lay in the water in a dull stupor that was neither sleep
nor honest waking.

Later, when the rations had been "dished out" we bestirred ourselves
and so found or dug queer coffin-shaped shelves in either wall. Out of
courtesy we called them dug-outs.

I do not remember that any one spoke much of the dead.

The rain stopped and for a time the unaccustomed sun came out. We
drove stakes in the walls above our coffins, hunted sand-bags and hung
them and spare equipment over the open face and then crawled back into
the water which, as usual, was already forming in the hollows that our
hips made where we lay. Until noon there was little heard but the
thick breathing of weary men. Occasionally one tossed and shouted
blasphemous warnings anent imaginary and bursting shells; whereat
those within hearing whined in a tired and hopeless anger, and, if
close by, kicked him. Trench nerves.

All day the fire of many guns sprayed us. Near by, the well defined
emplacement of one of our own batteries inevitably drew to the entire
vicinity a heavy fire so that one shell broke fair amongst our
sleeping men.

CHAPTER IV

MAJOR GAULT COMES BACK

"The King Is Dead": "Long Live the King"--Back to
Belle-waarde--The Seventh of May.

That was on the fifth. In the afternoon young Park came to us. He was
the Commanding Officer's orderly. There was do