Leaving our car at the Halte on the Menin Road, we essayed the route past Cavan's House that I had travelled a couple of days before with Bretherton.
Bang! bang! bang! bang! went a quartette of shrapnel just ahead.
"I don't think much of your route," said Nicholson.
"I'll change it with alacrity," said I. "Which way shall we go?"
"I know an old route that we followed in the days of the fighting last autumn," Wheeler volunteered. "If we push down the Menin Road to a point near Hooge, and then turn off, we can't get far wrong."
"Lot of French were hit in Hooge yesterday," I reminded him. "The Huns shell it two or three times every day, so best not go too close to it."
We tramped down to the foot of the hill that led up to the ruins of what was once Hooge, then passed through a demolished farm. For a hundred yards, at every step, we sank knee-deep in the foul, slimy mud.
Then we wound over trenches which were nearly inundated, and through barbed wire entanglements that seemed to become more impassable as they lost their original form, until at last, covered in perspiration, we reached a dense wood.
A tiny creek ran deep through a sharp cutting, in the sheer banks of which the French gunners had burrowed like rabbits. Battery on battery of "75's" were hidden in the forest. Each gun was surrounded by a little hut of mud and leaves, an aperture left for each slim, blue-grey muzzle. We passed the first of these batteries without seeing it. Close behind us it opened fire, causing me to jump as if I had been shot. Before we left the wood, three other batteries went into action about us. The din was terrific, but the sound of the shells racing overhead was most fascinating. Each gun crew had cleared a neat line of fire in the tree-tops in front of its position.