suggested war were the German prisoners at the side of the railway and the numerous dumps. But we drew nearer to the Front. The train halted at Abeele, a village near the frontier of France and Flanders. As we stopped here for a few minutes a number of us managed to dash into an estaminet opposite the station and get a drink! From Abeele onwards the most noticeable objects were the aeroplanes which were now very numerous above us, the presence of which indicated our proximity to the war.

At 6.30 the train came to a standstill in a station which I was informed was my destination, Poperinghe. "This is the railhead for the Ypres Salient" I was told. So out I got with my kit. I was expected. There was a mess cart awaiting me at the station; and in it I jogged along to the Transport Lines which were in the vicinity of Brandhoek a mile or so further on—on the left of the road from Poperinghe to Ypres.

The transport driver told me what it was like in that part, how it had been very quiet when the 55th Division took over their positions in the Salient from the 29th Division the previous autumn, but had grown more lively every day; how they had received a nasty gas bombardment only a few days ago, how the Boche had recently taken to shelling us furiously and systematically every night, and how there were some very hot times ahead—there was to be a raid by a battalion in our brigade that night.

It was fairly quiet when I arrived—it was a time of the day when things generally were somewhat quiet, when the guns were resting before joining in the nightly fray—so I did not immediately notice how near to the war I had come. But I was soon to realize it.

When I reached the Transport Lines I made the acquaintance of two officers of the 2/5th Lancashire Fusiliers of whom I was destined to see much in the coming months, Philip Cave Humfrey and Joseph Roake—especially Roake, as it was his good fortune to remain with the Battalion until long after the cessation of hostilities and to be with me in the 15th Lancashire Fusiliers in the Army of the Rhine. Humfrey, by a curious coincidence, turned out—though I did not know it until many months after—to be the brother-in-law of my school-friend William Lindop!

Never shall I forget that summer evening near Brandhoek. Roake, effervescing as always with droll wit, and Humfrey, with his natural cheerfulness and affability, made me at home in their little hut at once. I can well recall the scene: a tiny little wooden hut at the edge of a large field; the wall adorned by a trench map of the Ypres Salient, on which our present position was marked in pencil, and a striking group photo of the Imperial War Cabinet, taken out of an illustrated journal, in which the well-known faces of Lloyd George and Lord Curzon seemed to dominate the picture; a little table upon which Humfrey drafted a signal message to the Adjutant of the 2/5th, announcing my arrival and asking for instructions, the table upon which an excellent little dinner was almost immediately served; outside the observation balloons in a curved line, denoting the Salient, and aircraft sweeping through the skies.

It was then that I first saw what was going to be to me a very common sight during those memorable "Wipers days"—an air fight. I had not been in the little wooden hut many minutes before Roake called me out to watch a scrap between British and German aeroplanes over the Salient. We got out our field-glasses and, in the cool of a summer's evening, when any ordinary individual in "Blighty" would be relaxing from the labours of the day in cricket or in tennis, we surveyed with interest the contests between the chivalrous heroes of the air far above. It was then that I first saw a "blazing trail across the evening sky of Flanders." There were many such in the summer of 1917, though the brilliant young airman of whose death that glowing eulogy had been written now lay sleeping beneath a little wooden cross in the grave in which the Germans, paying homage to true chivalry, had laid him at Annoeullin. Who could watch those little specks rising and falling, and falling to rise no more, up there in the bright blue sky without a thrill of admiration for these "New Elizabethans" of England and Germany?

It was during tea that I realized that I was really at the war. The guns began to boom and the hut shook with the continual vibration. And then the band of the 2/5th Lancashire Fusiliers struck up some jolly tunes in the field. War and music going hand in hand, it was difficult to know whether one ought to feel jolly or sad. I think I may safely say that we felt as jolly and gay as could be; I know that the romantic aspect was the one which appealed to me most. This was the real thing, none of your home-service games.

The bombardment became more intense as the evening progressed. After dark the Transport moved off to carry rations up to the men in the line. If it is not superfluous to do so, I would wish to pay here the warmest possible tribute to those gallant Transport men who used to "carry rations on the road from Pop to Ypres." It was no picnic. The Boche knew quite well the time that vast and apparently never ending chain of traffic would be wending its nightly way from Poperinghe to Ypres. He shelled the great high road systematically every night. Every night some of those gallant men would go never to return. It seemed marvellous that so many could escape the destruction which was hurled at them; but war is full of wonders.

My diary of that night reads as follows:

"As it began to get dark the bombardment became louder and louder and the flashes more vivid. Shells were falling at Vlamertinghe, half way between Poperinghe and Ypres, exploding with a great sound. They were falling here yesterday!

"At about 10.30 p.m. we saw the Transport set off along the road, taking rations and supplies up to Ypres.... Humfrey went with them. (I would have gone up with him, but the Adjutant of the 2/5th had sent a message by the signals saying that I could sleep at the Transport Lines and report the following morning.) Red Cross motors were also coming back from Ypres with wounded. Meanwhile the moon—a full moon—steadily rose above the Front, amid the flashes between Ypres and Messines, the bombardment sounding like thunder. It was a fine scene. If only there had been an artist there to paint it! A farm on the Switch Road (a new road for traffic built by the British Army) some way off got on fire. I hear that the King's, in our Brigade, are going over the top on a raid to-night. Our great offensive here has not yet opened, but it will come off before very long....

"To bed 11.30, the guns booming like continuous thunder. I was awakened in the night by shells whizzing past the hut where I was sleeping."

So I was, at last, introduced to that strangest of all music—the screech of a shell: Whoo-oo-oo-oo-oo-UMP!

CHAPTER II

THE PRISON

It has already been observed that the 55th (West Lancashire) Division, after a hot time on the Somme, particularly at Guillemont and Ginchy, had come up the Salient in October, 1916. So when I joined the Division it was in the 8th Corps, commanded by Sir Aylmer Hunter-Weston ("Hunter-Bunter," as I remember Best-Dunkley calling him), in Sir Herbert Plumer's Second Army. The 55th Division was responsible for the sector between Wieltje and the south of Railway Wood.

The 55th Division was commanded by Major-General Jeudwine, of whom it has been said: "No General ever was more devoted to his Division: no Division ever was more devoted to its General."