One tall chap with a handsome beard showed us how a bullet had torn through his cap and grazed his head, while a rude sling and a crutch spoke of a more serious injury of which he said nothing. His white teeth and smiling face turned to a horrible scowl as he continued talking, and thinking we were over-exciting him, we moved away. Had we only known, he was trying to describe to us the terrible effect of the asphyxiating gas on his comrades who were less educated than he!
A few miles further on we detrained at Poperinghe and were soon marching along a beautiful avenue of poplars—now perhaps the most famous highway in Flanders, the Vlamertinghe road.
Refugees passed us with all their worldly effects piled on a waggon, the women and little children clattering along behind in their wooden sabots. It seemed so unnecessary. The guns that had been pounding away all night were now strangely silent, and the fields on either side seemed peaceful enough. There was even a farmer plowing stoically in one.
A little further on we saw a horse that had been hurriedly cut out from a gun or waggon team. It needed but one glance to tell us that shrapnel had done its deadly work there, and we wondered vaguely what had become of its rider, for the saddlery and harness were still on it.
On entering Vlamertinghe we saw signs of shelling on most of the buildings, particularly around the church and the square, the steeple of the former forming, of course, the aiming mark for the German guns. Here, too, the body of a woman lay half in and half out of a doorway. The place seemed absolutely deserted. An aeroplane droned overhead, but whether our own or the enemy's we could not ascertain. However, we took no chances and marched on, hugging the shelter of the walls on either side of the street.
In this formation we were met by the gaunt figure of old Joey ——, our quarter-master. He fell in beside Major V—— and guided us to our transport lines, a farm a little on the Ypres side of the town. Here we lay for half an hour munching biscuits and bully beef and watching an anti-aircraft gun shelling the aeroplane we had noticed before, which was now low enough to distinguish the sinister black crosses painted on its wings.
This was the reason for the extraordinary silence on the part of the guns, so skilfully hidden all around us.
The "Archibalds," as the anti-aircraft guns are popularly known, seemed to be making extraordinarily bad practice as the fleecy puffs of shrapnel burst all around the plane without apparent effect, and the machine, having spotted something, dropped a signal that burst into brilliant sparkles and turned for the enemy lines.
At this moment Joey returned from the outhouse concealing the telephonists with instructions that we were to proceed to the field, where the battalion was dug in at once.