I found great difficulty in picking my way through the square, past shell-holes, piles of paving blocks, and heaps of dead horses. At one end of the Grande Place a howitzer shell had burst directly on an artillery limber, the horses and men being piled indiscriminately together, every one instantly killed. They lay in a heap on the broken stones of the square.
Our previous brewery headquarters was levelled to the ground, and the house where we had slept when last in Ypres was smashed out of all recognition.
Shells were falling in Ypres as we went through it. Across the Menin bridge the road, once a broad highway, had been narrowed to a mere path by pile on pile of shell-strewn bricks and stones. The houses were one by one completely disappearing, as though the space they occupied was required for other purposes, and the demolition of each one of them was a preconceived part of a plan of extinction of all signs of habitation.
Dead horses in dozens along the way lay close to the wheel track. We passed an ambulance, its front portion torn away by a shell, and then the remnants of a supply wagon, smashed to matchwood.
As we sped on, as fast as the continual obstructions and deep shell-holes would allow, shells fell behind us, screeching overhead every few seconds with strange, weird, discordant notes, culminating in a reverberating bang! that seemed thrown back at us by the high walls across the moat.
The dozens of dead horses became scores as we pushed on. Some fields by the road were literally covered with them.
A signals corps man told me that at one point his orders for dark night journeys across those fields were as follows: "Go down the hedge till you reach the ditch, turn right, and go toward the big pile of dead horses until you come to the gap in the next hedge." Those instructions could be easily followed on the blackest night, if one's olfactory nerves were in working order.
Every breath of air seemed to our unaccustomed nostrils to be charged with noisome smells.
As we approached Potijze the infantry fire grew less in volume. The Hun onslaught, the first of five distinct attacks to be pushed home by the Germans that day, had failed, and the breathing space was the more heavily punctuated by the howitzer shells for half an hour, as if in a special spleen of disappointment.