During the four and a half months of that fighting the war correspondents were billeted in the old town of Cassel, where, perched on a hill which looks over a wide stretch of Flanders, through our glasses we could see the sand-dunes beyond Dunkirk and with the naked eyes the whole vista of the battle-line round Ypres and in the wide curve all the countryside lying between Aire and Hazebrouck and Notre Dame de Lorette. My billet was in a monastery for old priests, on the eastern edge of the town, and at night my window was lighted by distant shellfire, and I gazed out to a sky of darkness rent by vivid flashes, bursts of red flame, and rockets rising high. The priests used to tap at my door when I came back from the battlefields all muddy, with a slime-plastered face, writing furiously, and an old padre used to plague me like that, saying:
“What news? It goes well, eh? Not too well, perhaps! Alas! it is a slaughter on both sides.”
“It is all your fault,” I said once, chaffingly, to get rid of him. “You do not pray enough.”
He grasped my wrist with his skinny old hand.