No news could I find of General de Lisle until Captain Webb, of the Signal Corps, arrived.
"The General?" he said in reply to my query. "I think the General is in a house on the right of the road as you leave Ypres on the west."
I lost no time in getting under way. The return journey was like a bad dream. Shells fell in the vicinity of the road, but not so near as to damage the steadily flowing river of troops, ammunition and food transport, horse and mechanical; ambulances, motor-cycles, and once, another car.
A fatiguing house-to-house search landed me at the spot where dinner had been. Orders left for me instructed me to bring various impedimenta to the Menin Road; so, for the third time, I ploughed through Ypres and toward the Halte, where at last I found de Lisle. Nor was that by any means the last trip over that route that I was to make that night. But enough of motoring troubles.
On the 18th it rained with dour persistency.
The 1st Cavalry Division line ran south from the Ypres-Roulers railway, past the west shore of the Bellewaarde Lake. It dipped south-east around the ruins of the Hooge Château and to the east of where Hooge once stood. Crossing the Menin Road, the front threaded the Sanctuary Wood, on the eastern edge of which the enemy were entrenched.
The position in the Sanctuary Wood was the extreme easterly promontory of the Ypres Salient, and not many yards west of the line which the 1st Cavalry Division held in February and March.
General de Lisle's cellar headquarters were less than 2,000 yards from the nearest front-line trench, and Hooge itself was not much further distant.
In an adjacent farm, which had been abandoned for many days, dead cattle and chickens lay about the yard. The table in the living room showed the family had decamped at meal time, evidently hurried by a shell which shaved a corner off the house. They left without waiting to gather up any of their simple belongings.