. But in a moment of rare
silence I heard the chime of a church clock. It seemed like the sweet
voice of that old-time peace in Arras before the days of its agony, and
I thought of that solitary bell sounding above the ruins in a ghostly
way.

XV

While we hung on the news from Verdun--it seemed as though the fate of
the world were in Fort Douaumont--our own lists of death grew longer.

In the casualty clearing station by Poperinghe more mangled men lay on
their stretchers, hobbled to the ambulance-trains, groped blindly with
one hand clutching at a comrade's arm. More, and more, and more, with
head wounds, and body wounds, with trench-feet, and gas.

"O Christ!" said one of them whom I knew. He had been laid on a
swing-bed in the ambulance-train.

"Now you will be comfortable and happy," said the R.A.M.C. orderly.

The boy groaned again. He was suffering intolerable agony, and, grasping
a strap, hauled himself up a little with a wet sweat breaking out on his
forehead.

Another boy came along alone, with one hand in a big bandage. He told me
that it was smashed to bits, and began to cry. Then he smudged the tears
away and said:

"I'm lucky enough. I saw many fellows killed."

So it happened, day by day, but the courage of our men endured.

It seemed impossible to newcomers that life could exist at all under the
shell-fire which the Germans flung over our trenches and which we flung
over theirs. So it seemed to the Irish battalions when they held the
lines round Loos, by that Hohenzollern redoubt which was one of our
little hells.

"Things happened," said one of them, "which in other times would have
been called miracles. We all had hairbreadth escapes from death." For
days they were under heavy fire, with 9.2's flinging up volumes of
sand and earth and stones about them. Then waves of poison-gas. Then
trench-mortars and bombs.

"It seemed like years!" said one of the Irish crowd. "None of us
expected to come out alive."

Yet most of them had the luck to come out alive that time, and over a
midday mess in a Flemish farmhouse they had hearty appetites for bully
beef and fried potatoes, washed down by thin red wine and strong black
coffee.

Round Ypres, and up by Boesinghe and Hooge--you remember Hooge?--the
14th, 20th, and 6th Divisions took turns in wet ditches and in
shell-holes, with heavy crumps falling fast and roaring before
they burst like devils of hell. On one day there were three hundr