Libby, who was ever a leader in any reckless enterprise, accompanied by Fitzpatrick, made their way into Ypres and came back with stores of good things to eat and drink and bursting stories of the quantity of stuff lying around. "If we only had a motor truck we could have filled it," they said.
Next day I went with a party. It was no small feat to get away from the battalion without being noticed, but we managed it and Libby led the way to the barracks occupied formerly by the Belgians, and used during the winter of 1914-15 as headquarters for the British divisions who were holding the salient.
THE YSER CANAL.
The barbed-wire entanglements mark the first-line German trenches. The men in the picture are German officers.
A Belgian sentry at the battered gates allowed us to go in and we mounted the stairs of the barracks, entering a long room that apparently had been the sleeping quarters of the Belgian soldiers, for pegs and numbers and framework of cots were hanging on the wall. But what interested us most was a number of brand-new Lee-Enfield rifles packed away in boxes; we possessed ourselves with one each. Then we turned our attention to the clothing left by the quartermasters of the British Army. We quickly selected underwear, a good jackknife each, and anything else to which we took a fancy. The underwear was of the very finest quality, being sent out by the ladies in England to the young subalterns. Canned fruit, rations of tea, chocolate—everything heart could desire was there in abundance. Our chief trouble was in determining what to select and what to leave.
When we sallied out the difficulty was to dodge the pickets who had been placed in the town to prevent looting. Now we had been unquestionably looting, but it was excusable in that we took nothing that belonged to the civil population; still it properly came under the head of looting and the pickets would have shot us on sight had they caught us with our spoils. Therefore, it was one thing to get it, but quite another thing to transport it in safety to our dugout.