ancies that at night-time the ghosts of 1915 mingle with
the ghosts of Philip of Spain's era of conquest and the ghosts of great
days in other centuries, as they search the ruins for relics of the city
they knew.

Left of us was the salient, studded with broken villages that became
household names during the two epic Battles of Ypres. The brown soil was
dirty, shell-ploughed, and altogether unlovely. Those strange markings,
which from our height looked like the tortuous pathways of a serpent,
were the trenches, old and new, front-line, support, and communication.
Small saps projected from the long lines at every angle. So complicated
was the jumble that the sinister region of No Man's Land, with its
shell-holes, dead bodies, and barbed wire, was scarcely distinguishable.

A brown strip enclosed the trenches and wound northward and southward.
Its surface had been torn and battered by innumerable shells. On its
fringe, among the copses and crests, were the guns, though these were
evidenced only by an occasional flash. Behind, in front, and around them
were those links in the chain of war, the oft-cut telephone wires. The
desolation seemed utterly bare, though one knew that over and under it,
hidden from eyes in the air, swarmed the slaves of the gun, the rifle,
and the bomb.

Following the belt of wilderness southward, we were obliged to veer to
the right at St. Eloi, so as to round a sharp bend. Below the bend, and
on the wrong side of it, was the Messines Ridge, the recent capture of
which has straightened the line as far as Hooge, and flattened the Ypres
salient out of existence as a salient. Next came the torn and desolate
outline of Plug Street Wood, and with it reminiscences of a splendid
struggle against odds when shell-shortage hampered our 1915 armies.
Armentieres appeared still worthy to be called a town. It was battered,
but much less so than Ypres, possibly because it was a hotbed of German
espionage until last year. The triangular denseness of Lille loomed up
from the flat soil on our left.

As we passed down the line the brown band narrowed until it seemed a
strip of discoloured water-marked ribbon sewn over the mosaic of open
country. The trench-lines were monotonous in their sameness. The
shell-spotted area bulged at places, as for example Festubert, Neuve
Chapelle (of bitter memory), Givenchy, Hulluch, and Loos. Lens, well
behind the German trenches in those days, showed few marks of
bombardment. The