That was before the great mines had blown Wytschaete to hell. . . .
But—every half-minute by his wrist-watch—white puffs of cotton-wool existed on the dark lines—the German trenches before Wytschaete. Our artillery practice. . . . Good shooting. Jolly good shooting!
Miles and miles away to the left . . . beneath the haze of light that, on a clouded day, the sea threw off, a shaft of sunlight fell, and was reflected in a grey blur. . . . It was the glass roofs of a great airplane shelter!
A great plane, the largest he had then seen, was moving over, behind his back, with four little planes as an escort. . . . Over the vast slag-heaps by Béthune. . . . High, purplish-blue heaps, like the steam domes of engines or the breasts of women. . . . Bluish purple. More blue than purple. . . . Like all Franco-Belgian Gobelins tapestry. . . . And all quiet. . . . Under the vast pall of quiet cloud! . . .
There were shells dropping in Poperinghe. . . . Five miles out, under his nose. . . . The shells dropped. White vapour rose and ran away in plumes. . . . What sort of shells? . . . There were twenty different kinds of shells. . . .
The Huns were shelling Poperinghe! A senseless cruelty. It was five miles behind the line! Prussian brutality. . . . There were two girls who kept a tea-shop in Poperinghe. . . . High coloured. . . . General Plumer had liked them . . . a fine old general. . . . The shells had killed them both . . . Any man might have slept with either of them with pleasure and profit. . . . Six thousand of H.M. officers must have thought the same about those high-coloured girls. Good girls! . . . But the Hun shells got them. . . . What sort of fate was that? . . . To be desired by six thousand men and smashed into little gobbets of flesh by Hun shells?
It appeared to be mere Prussianism—the senseless cruelty of the Hun!—to shell Poperinghe. An innocent town with a tea-shop five miles behind Ypres. . . . Little noiseless plumes of smoke rising under the quiet blanketing of the pale maroon skies, with the haze from the aeroplane shelters, and the great aeroplanes over the Béthune slag-heaps. . . . What a dreadful name—Béthune. . . .
Probably, however, the Germans had heard that we were massing men in Poperinghe. It was reasonable to shell a town where men were being assembled. . . . Or we might have been shelling one of their towns with an Army H.Q. in it. So they shelled Poperinghe in the silent grey day. . . .
That was according to the rules of the service. . . . General Campion, accepting with equanimity what German airplanes did to the hospitals, camps, stables, brothels, theatres, boulevards, chocolate stalls and hotels of his town would have been vastly outraged if Hun planes had dropped bombs on his private lodgings. . . . The rules of war! . . . You spare, mutually, each other's headquarters and blow to pieces girls that are desired by six thousand men apiece. . . .
That had been nineteen months before! . . . Now, having lost so much emotion, he saw the embattled world as a map. . . . An embossed map of greenish papier mâché. The blood of O Nine Morgan was blurring luminously over it. At the extreme horizon was territory labelled White Ruthenians! Who the devil were those poor wretches?