"A month later my duty took me back to Ypres, and I found myself walking up the Rue Bar-le-Duc towards the little antique shop. Overhead the shells whistled without cessation. It was now a city of the dead—one could not realize that it was the same pleasant little town where I had met with so strange an experience a few weeks back. Men, children and horses were lying dead in every gutter.
"In due course I arrived at the shop. A large hole had been ripped in the pavé road before the door, and I had to step over a dead and twisted soldier to gain an entrance. Of course the place was empty. Ombos, Albertus Magnus and all the wonderful contents of the spacious old rooms had disappeared. I made a search of the house, and it was not without a curious sensation in my heart that I entered the room where the Master of Masters had towered in his niche. Silence—only the faint boom of a gun far away in the French trenches—awful, ghastly silence. Then a deafening roar and a falling of masonry as Krupp's marked down another house in the town of sorrow. The horror of it!
"I turned dismally away, out into the Rue Bar-le-Duc, and along the square. A few scattered lights shone feebly through the evening mist, and over towards the Norman bridge the yellow flames from a burning house lit up the sky with a lurid glow. At nearly every street corner little groups of civilians had collected and were talking and gesticulating in a terrified manner. When a big shell came with a hoarse, rattling noise through the air, like a racing motor cycle on the track at Brooklands, they would rush into their homes, panic-smitten. If death winked, and passed them over, out they would creep again. And so they lived in an inferno of shells for weeks on end.
"An ambulance wagon overturned in the middle of the road attracted my attention. I could not repress a shudder as I looked on the shell-shattered wreck.... It was the old type of four-horse ambulance used by the army in South Africa; possibly it had jolted into the shell-swept death-trap of Spion Kop, or carried men into the reeking enteric camps of Ladysmith. Well, it had made its last journey this time! The four dead horses had not been cut away from the traces, and from underneath the huddled and twisted heap stuck out an arm, and in the hand was clutched one of those short, stumpy whips which are used by the lead driver of a gun. I can see that poor chap in my mind thrashing and urging his team of horses into a gallop, for it was not reckoned wise to meander about the streets of Ypres, and then—one blinding crash.
"I swung round with a great desire to get away from the appalling scene, and as I did so, I noticed a girl in a doorway struggling in the grip of a powerful, swarthy-faced man of middle age. In the fading light I caught a glimpse of her face, and I was out of the shadow and by her side like a sky-rocket.
"'Let her go!' I said shortly. 'Before I mop out the gutter with you.'
"The man turned on me.
"'Who the devil——'
"'That's enough!'
"A Red Cap—a corporal in the Military Police—loomed into view, and with an imprecation the rough backed away from the girl, turned, and in a moment was lost in the gloom. I brought my eyes back to the girl who had confronted me in the red light of sunset, and I stood gazing at her dumbly, fascinated, but with never a word to say. She was burning with anger and shame, trembling like an aspen, too.