PROLOGUE
“B/—th will detail the liaison officer for the Group for to-morrow the 5th.”
The Brigade orderly splashed in bearing the unwelcome message. I had just turned in. The never-to-be-forgotten fatal three days’ downpour which had set in on the 31st July 1917 and had upset so many calculations had just stopped and we had enjoyed an afternoon and evening of bright sunshine and cloudless skies. The water in the dug-out, which had risen steadily in spite of temporary responses to our efforts with an old trench pump and a chain of buckets, was now gradually beginning to abate and the stretcher on which I slept was once more high and dry. Also I was due to go down to waggon-lines in two days’ time, and life generally was taking on a less sombre hue.
It could afford to. Our six weeks in action in the Salient had been lived in an atmosphere of almost unrelieved gloom, an atmosphere—so we had come to believe—inalienable from the place itself.
One had come to realise what men had meant who in earlier days on the Somme—when all was said to be quiet at Ypres—had trekked south into the Valley of the Shadow of Death and remarked that “it was better than the Salient.” Now we had seen for ourselves. It had not merely been the shelling and the fact that there was not a really safe spot, except in the very ramparts of the Eastern wall themselves, between Belgian Battery Corner and the front line. It had not merely been that the German gunners conveyed the impression that they were aiming at you, that they knew exactly where you were, and that they were doing it—had been doing it all along—more as a pleasure than as an allotted task. It had not been the fact that no fatigue or waggon-line party could set great hopes on returning scatheless from a job of work; nor that here hostile aeroplane observation seemed more acute than in other parts; nor again that rarely a night passed but one saw or heard of some shambles on a main traffic road. It was none of these things. The spirit of Ypres was abroad, impregnating those new to her. From the very morning when, accompanying a harassed, jumpy acting C.R.A. on his round of battery inspections, I had first seen her, I had felt the spell upon me. It was like grey skies and a wind in the east, the quintessence of sombreness. The intervals of quiet could not be called peace; they served only to intensify the solitude. The history of the place seemed to cast its stamp on those who sojourned in it.
A street in Ypres.
The Cloth Hall in 1917.