Paris, Calais, St. Omer, Estaires, Lillers, Merville and Hazebrouck were visited by enemy airmen as the days went by, and bombs dropped, but without much damage to lives or property.
"The Huns don't care whether or not they hit anything," said one sage "sub." "They only want to show Sir Douglas Haig they have a copy of that March 10th Order of his wherein he said 'Our Flying Corps has driven the Germans from the air.'"
On March 25th I spent the morning in Bailleul at 2nd Corps and 3rd Corps Headquarters.
The Staffordshire Brigade of the North Midland Territorial Division marched past to the music of their fine brass band, drawn up in the square—the first band I had seen or heard since leaving England seven months before. Crowds of soldiers and officers flocked to hear it and see the sturdy Terriers march by with swinging step. They created a splendid impression.
The next day my work was to take General Lowe and General Lumley over the path of the early fighting in Flanders—from Meteren through Bailleul to Armentières, thence to the line on the Ploegsteert Hill and through the Ploegsteert Wood.
We stopped in the town of Ploegsteert, where, in the churchyard, General Lumley's son, a gallant young officer in the 11th Hussars, was buried.
The boy had been killed on October 17th, when our Division was trying to force a way across the River Lys. At Le Touquet Lieutenant Lumley was reconnoitring a position preparatory to an advance when a German sniper's bullet struck him.
As the General visited his son's grave I learned from townsfolk how things had fared with them.
Months before the 1st Cavalry Division had been the first British contingent to enter Ploegsteert. The people told me of the severe shelling the town had suffered, though the shattered church and a black hole where the principal estaminet once stood were surrounded by many other evidences of the damage of the Hun gun-fire.