"We have been here through it all," said an old lady whose French had a heavy Flemish accent. "We go into the cellars when the bombardment begins, and when it ends we come out and go about our work. What else could we do?"
Some townsfolk had been hit, but none killed, they said. The merry baker, whose brown bread had been so greatly enjoyed by our mess, had been hit by shrapnel bullet a few weeks before and killed. His wife was running the bakery still, though in but a small way, she said, sadly.
The Bois de Ploegsteert and the line in its vicinity was much the same as when our Division had left it months before. The wood was perhaps a little more smashed, the château a bit more flattened.
Our batteries fired regularly as we walked about, their shells whirring over our heads without eliciting a single reply shot from the Huns.
Down the corduroy roads through the Ploegsteert Wood and to its trench-line, where the men were far from uncomfortable, the path seemed sufficiently familiar to have been there for years instead of months.
Next day, the 27th, my work took me still further afield. General de Lisle, with General Briggs and General Mullens and one or two members of their staffs, were to walk over the reserve line of trenches from in front of Kemmel to Dickebusch. One of General Smith-Dorrien's Staff officers was to accompany them.
Dismounting from the cars at the Station Inn, on the Neuve Eglise-Kemmel Road, the party headed for the reserve trenches. I was instructed to convoy the other cars in the party to a spot on the Ypres side of Dickebusch.
"Don't stop at the cross-roads," said Captain Walker of the 2nd Army Staff. "The Germans shell the cross-roads two or three times every day. It's best to run up the Vlamertinghe Road a couple of hundred yards and wait there. You are not so likely to be hit."
Past Dranoutre and Locre, and thence through La Clytte and Dickebusch my route led. Familiar ground of months past, every inch of it. Here and there fields had been ploughed well by shell-fire, and many once familiar buildings along the way had been shattered or destroyed. It was uncanny to find that more than one spot which I had in former days selected as a daily stand for the car had become a great gaping hole dug by a huge howitzer shell.