At eleven o'clock that night, when every one, except the sentries, was slumbering, the copse was suddenly filled with a fearful din, with occasional shots, and a few shouts. Then all was silent again.
Shortly afterwards the Indians returned. Two by two they came in and placed before their officer a prisoner tied up like a sausage, and carefully gagged. This went on until all the thirty German sentinels who had been guarding the entrance to the wood had been brought in and handed over to the officer.
CHAPTER XII.
FIRE AND FLOOD.
We will now leave that melancholy region in which Britons of the Second Corps, like the ocean cliffs of their native land, have been thrusting back the furious surges of hostile attack for long and weary weeks. Melancholy indeed is the country over which the tide of war has swept. Prosperous villages and comfortable homesteads are now crumbling walls and smoking ruins, with the decaying carcasses of horses, cows, and pigs lying around. To and fro wander those wretched inhabitants who have escaped shot and shell, striving to save something from the wreckage of their homes. "Here, blocking up a narrow side street, is a dead horse still harnessed to a trap, and beside it is stretched the corpse of a Jäger[55]; close by, in an enclosure where a shell has found them, lie some thirty cavalry horses; a little farther on is laid out a row of German dead, for whom graves are being dug by the peasants.
"The work of burial falls to a great extent on the inhabitants, who, with our soldiers, take no little care in marking the last resting-places of their countrymen and their Allies, either by little wooden crosses or else by flowers. Amidst the graves scattered all over the countryside are the rifle pits, trenches, and gun emplacements, which those now resting below the sod helped to defend or to attack. From these the progress of the fighting can be traced."
We now move northwards to the stretch of country which lies between Ypres and the sea. It is a flat, marshy land, where the inhabitants are doomed to an everlasting struggle against the thankless soil and the invading flood. More than once the district has been the bed of an ancient sea. Beet grows on the silt of old bays; seaports have become agricultural villages, and channels along which large ships formerly sailed are green polders.[56] Only a very complete system of drainage saves the country from being water-logged. It is literally seamed with canals and dykes, and crops are only raised by the unremitting labour of men's hands. The towns and villages are small, and a few highroads, consisting of narrow causeways of cobble stone with broad bands of mud on either side, serve their needs. It is a dismal land of frequent rains and white mists, though quaint and pleasing in sunshine, when its white farmsteads, whirling windmills, lofty spires, and everlasting lines of pollards and poplars seem very attractive to the foreign eye.
From Ypres seawards runs a canal which meets the Yser six miles south of the large village of Dixmude.[57] From Dixmude on to the sea, a distance of eleven miles, we find the canalized Yser, the main waterway of the district. Near the left bank of the canal, at a distance of about a mile and a half, runs a single-line railway,[58] which passes the villages of Pervyse[59] and Ramscappelle,[60] and has its terminus at the mouth of the river. No railway crosses the Yser between Dixmude and Nieuport, but the road from Bruges forks and sends one branch across the stream to Nieuport, and the other to Pervyse.
A number of small creeks of brackish water flow through the low, marshy meadows, below the level of the sea, and bring their sluggish tribute to the Yser. Along the edges of the canal are two or three "islands" of higher ground; but nowhere, until we reach the dunes of the seashore, are there any elevations or commanding positions for guns. It is a blind, sodden country, as ill-fitted for the passage of troops and heavy guns as the coast region of Essex.