December 6, 1914. Great joy at our battery. Our Captain has received the Order of Leopold for his fine reconnaissance, November 28, 1914, on the Yser.
The Irony of Fate
By M. Sadsawska, Civic Guard, Motorcyclist of the 1st Line Regiment
We were occupying the Dixmude Sector. Our trenches were hollowed out in the road which skirts the Yser, and the Regiment was sheltering in the centre of a vast horseshoe-shaped curl, traced by the river among the meadow grasses. The scenery was dolefully sad. Beyond a row of century-old trees, or rather of poor trunks of trees bewailing their scathed branches, which seemed to be mounting guard around our shelters, the ruins of a railway bridge stood out, half hidden in the water. On the embankment, surrounded by broken and twisted telegraph poles, and festoons of wires and cables all mixed up, lay a powerful locomotive, which had been overturned, so that its wheels were in the air. The melancholiness of the site did not disturb our equanimity at all. We were full of hopefulness and quite ready to march on towards the piles of fallen roofs, gaping houses, and tottering walls of strange shapes, which now constituted Dixmude, our old Flemish city. In the misty twilight, it seemed to us as though the poor town were stretching out its mutilated arms to us, and as though the murmur of the wind in the ruins were hailing us.
"Courage, courage, come!" it seemed to say.