Along the Menin road there were wayside dressing stations for wounded, with surgeons at work, and I saw the same scenes there. They were not beyond the danger zone. Doctors and orderlies were killed by long-range shells. Wounded were wounded again or finished off. Some ambulances were blown to bits. A colonel who had been standing in talk with a doctor was killed halfway through a sentence.

There was never a day in which Ypres was not shelled by long-range high velocities which came howling overhead as I heard them scores of times in passing through those ruins with gas-mask at the alert, according to orders, and steel hat strapped on, and a deadly sense of nostalgia because of what was happening in the fields of horror that lay beyond. Yet to the soldier farther up the Menin road Ypres was sanctuary and God’s heaven.