round charcoal stoves or sat motionless on wooden forms, waiting for
ambulances. Yet they were stark in spirit still.

"Only the mud beat us," they said. Man after man said that.

"We should have gone much farther except for the mud."

Along the Menin road there were wayside dressing stations for wounded,
with surgeons at work, and I saw the same scenes there. They were not
beyond the danger zone. Doctors and orderlies were killed by long-range
shells. Wounded were wounded again or finished off. Some ambulances were
blown to bits. A colonel who had been standing in talk with a doctor was
killed halfway through a sentence.

There was never a day in which Ypres was not shelled by long-range high
velocities which came howling overhead as I heard them scores of times
in passing through those ruins with gas-mask at the alert, according
to orders, and steel hat strapped on, and a deadly sense of nostalgia
because of what was happening in the fields of horror that lay beyond.
Yet to the soldier farther up the Menin road Ypres was sanctuary and
God's heaven.

The little old town of Cassel on the hill--where once a Duke of York
marched up and then marched down again--was beyond shell-range, though
the enemy tried to reach it and dropped twelve-inch shells (which make
holes deep enough to bury a coach and horses) round its base. There
is an inn there--the Hotel du Sauvage--which belongs now to English
history, and Scottish and Irish and Welsh and Australian and Canadian.
It was the last place along the road to Ypres where men who loved life
could get a dinner sitting with their knees below a table-cloth,
with candle-light glinting in glasses, while outside the windows the
flickering fires of death told them how short might be their tarrying
in the good places of the world. This was a good place where the
blinds were pulled down by Madame, who understood. Behind the desk was
Mademoiselle Suzanne, "a dainty rogue in porcelain," with wonderfully
bright eyes and just a little greeting of a smile for any young officer
who looked her way trying to get that greeting, because it was ever so
long since he had seen a pretty face and might be ever so long again.
Sometimes it was a smile met in the mirror against the wall, to which
Suzanne looked to touch her curls and see, like the Lady of Shalott,
the pictures of life that passed. A man would tilt his chair to get
that angle of vision. Outside, on these nights of war, it was often
bl