"Gute Reise!" one of them yelled.
Pleasant journey!
VI
A NIGHT BEFORE YPRES
The following are expanded pages of the diary that I kept from five o'clock in the evening of January 10th, 1915, to seven o'clock the next morning.
5 P. M.: The motor has stopped, but I wonder why. In Houthem the Bavarian captain told us that we were going to Brigade Headquarters. I can see though only a dirty brick farmhouse; its door is open and the light of a lamp falling on the yard seems to float in a yellow watery pool. But the other gray-green army car has stopped too, and Hauptmann Kliewer is getting out.
So we pile out on the muddy road just as Hauptmann Kliewer beckons us to come on. Behind us the ruined walls of Houthem are hiding in the thickening dusk, but the grayish steeple where the Germans have—and the French used to have—their observers, persistently shows itself.
Hauptmann Kliewer and the Bavarian captain have left the road and are wading through the mud of the farmhouse yard. I thought we were going to Brigade Headquarters. We splash on after them. Hours before at the battery we sank in mud to the tops of our puttees; now the novelty has worn off. Through an open barn door I see a motor and think of it as being hidden there, an impression which grows, upon noticing that all the windows in the rear of the house are covered with boards, so that no light is visible. But the front door is visible. Yes, but that faces Houthem where the Germans are, and these rear windows face Ypres and the English and the French. About that silent house broods mystery. Hauptmann Kliewer is knocking and the door opens just enough for us to pass in one at a time, and is hurriedly closed. I wonder if a French observer could have seen that narrow bar of light. Probably not, for in the room only candles are burning—three stubby candles on a long kitchen table, around which soldiers are sitting. And something buzzes, and picking up one of the many telephones, a soldier says into it, "Brigade Hauptquartier." A moment, and it buzzes again. And once more the monotonous "Brigade Hauptquartier." And it dawns upon me that this dirty farmhouse must be the Brigade Headquarters that they told us we would visit. The kitchen now has a new interest.