inst
Poelcapelle, Passchendaele, Becelaere, Gheluvelt, and Zandvoorde; at
very many points he dented the line. It seemed as if he would charge
down the wall; but, although a slight tremor passed through its
foundation, the wall held. The impressions that I continued to receive
were extremely grave. Tactically everything had been done; the fore
field was good. Our artillery practice had materially improved. Behind
nearly every fighting--division there stood a second, as rear wave. In
the third line, too, there were still reserves. We knew that the wear
and tear of the enemy's forces was high. But we also knew that the enemy
was extraordinarily strong and, what was equally important, possessed
extraordinary will-power."

That was the impression of the cold brain directing the machinery of war
from German headquarters. More human and more tragic is a letter of an
unknown German officer which we found among hundreds of others, telling
the same tale, in the mud of the battlefield:

"If it were not for the men who have been spared me on this fierce day
and are lying around me, and looking timidly at me, I should shed hot
and bitter tears over the terrors that have menaced me during these
hours. On the morning of September 18th my dugout containing seventeen
men was shot to pieces over our heads. I am the only one who withstood
the maddening bombardment of three days and still survives. You cannot
imagine the frightful mental torments I have undergone in those few
hours. After crawling out through the bleeding remnants of my comrades,
and through the smoke and debris, wandering and running in the midst of
the raging gun-fire in search of a refuge, I am now awaiting death at
any moment. You do not know what Flanders means. Flanders means endless
human endurance. Flanders means blood and scraps of human bodies.
Flanders means heroic courage and faithfulness even unto death."

To British and to Germans it meant the same.

VI

During the four and a half months of that fighting the war
correspondents were billeted in the old town of Cassel, where, perched
on a hill which looks over a wide stretch of Flanders, through our
glasses we could see the sand-dunes beyond Dunkirk and with the naked
eyes the whole vista of the battle-line round Ypres and in the wide
curve all the countryside lying between Aire and Hazebrouck and Notre
Dame de Lorette. My billet was in a monastery for old priests, on the
eastern edge of the town