One day I was searching for a shop where bolts could, once upon a time, be purchased. As I was going down the Rue de Lille, half a dozen shells fell near. One demolished a house but fifty yards ahead. I took shelter in a doorway, and as I did so a Belgian of woebegone appearance, his most characteristic feature a pair of sad, drooping, yellow moustachios, ambled past me down the roadway, pushing a wheelbarrow. On it were three tiny tots, all under four years old. They cuddled together for warmth. One, round-eyed, at the crash of the howitzer shells, was hard at work with a nursing bottle. I warned the Belgian of impending danger, but he stolidly trudged on. Luckily, no more shells came for a time.
The Menin Road proper was never healthy. I spent as little time on it as consistent with the proper performance of my work. I never sat for an hour in its vicinity, waiting for the General, that some shell did not fall near it.
One afternoon shrapnel fell for an hour near a fork on the Menin Road, which all sensible men gave a wide berth to when convenient. Fifteen minutes after the bombardment died down, a procession filed by the fork, headed for a graveyard in the direction of Hooge. A white-robed boy, with red-tasselled black cap, led the way, bearing a cross. Behind him came a robed priest, then an ancient, dilapidated, one-horse hearse containing a rude, black coffin. A score of mourners, one or two of them men, the rest women and children, dressed in their poor best, brought up the rear.
I wondered that they ventured down that shell-swept highway. Yet many such pathetic little processions passed along that road in those days.
I saw one cortège wait for a cessation of the shelling, then proceed slowly over the ground that had but a few minutes before been peppered with bits of shell. It was an odd sight. A tiny lad trotted in front under a large wooden cross painted purple. A quartette of little boys behind him bore a rude unpainted sort of stretcher, apparently improvised from the nearest bits of shattered timber to hand. The coffin, resting upon this frame, was covered with a dingy white sheet. A mother, bowed and feeble, followed the coffin. A few youths and a handful of little girls formed the straggling cortège, tramping over the snow-covered cobbles, their eyes downcast and red.
Death was no stranger in Ypres in those days, but still the Belgians stayed on.
The wall of a ruined building, across the road from the Cloth Hall, fell one morning with a loud crash. A column of dust arose. That many were not injured was surprising. One woman was killed and a couple of passing French soldiers hurt, but post-card vendors were exhibiting their wares under an adjacent wall, equally dangerous, an hour later.
General de Lisle went personally over the whole of the line held by his Division. The 1st Cavalry Brigade was in the front trenches for the first five days, the 2nd Brigade in reserve. Then the 2nd Brigade took over the trenches and the 1st Brigade came back, for the second five days, to the dug-outs.
At points in the line the trenches were knee-deep and sometimes even waist-deep with cold mud and water. The amount of manual labour required to get them into better shape was enormous. New trenches had to be dug, the old parapets strengthened, the trenches drained, and all the while certain mining work must be pushed on at a rapid rate. In some parts of the line the parapets of sandbags had become so thin that a Mauser bullet could plough through them easily. The German snipers were at one place only thirty yards distant.
The drainage of the worst bits of trench, and the laying of a sort of corduroy road from point to point, soon made the trenches much more habitable.