IV

Our new passes took us to the top of a hill well known to the few
onlookers of which this war admits. The motor stopped at a point on the
road where a picket was stationed, who examined our papers. Then came a
stiff and muddy climb, past a dugout for protection in case of shelling,
Captain ---- carrying the three gas-helmets. At the top was a flat green
space--three or four soldiers playing football on it!--and an old
windmill, and farm-buildings.

We sheltered behind the great beams supporting the windmill, and looked
out through them, north and east, over a wide landscape; a plain bordered
eastward by low hills, every mile of it, almost, watered by British blood,
and consecrate to British dead. As we reached the windmill, as though in
sombre greeting, the floating mists on the near horizon seemed to part,
and there rose from them a dark, jagged tower, one side of it torn away.
It was the tower of Ypres--mute victim!--mute witness to a crime, that,
beyond the reparations of our own day, history will avenge through years
to come.

A flash!--another!--from what appear to be the ruins at its base. It is
the English guns speaking from the lines between us and Ypres; and as we
watch we see the columns of white smoke rising from the German lines as
the shells burst. There they are, the German lines--along the Messines
ridge. We make them out quite clearly, thanks to a glass and Captain
----'s guidance. Their guns, too, are at work, and a couple of their
shells are bursting on our trenches somewhere between Vlamertinghe and
Dickebusche. Then the rattle of our machine-guns--as it seems from
somewhere close below us, and again the boom of the artillery.