The approach to it was sinister after one had left Poperinghe and passed through the skeleton of Vlamertinghe church, beyond Goldfish Château⁠ ⁠… For a long time Poperinghe was the last link with a life in which men and women could move freely without hiding from the pursuit of death; and even there, from time to time, there were shells from long-range guns and, later, night-birds dropping high-explosive eggs. Round about Poperinghe, by Reninghelst and Locre, long convoys of motor-wagons, taking up a new day’s rations from the railheads, raised clouds of dust which powdered the hedges white. Flemish carthorses with huge fringes of knotted string wended their way between motor-lorries and gun-limbers. Often the sky was blue above the hop-gardens, with fleecy clouds over distant woodlands and the gray old towers of Flemish churches and the windmills on Mont Rouge and Mont Neir, whose sails have turned through centuries of peace and strife. It all comes back to me as I write⁠—that way to Ypres, and the sounds and the smells of the roads and fields where the traffic of war went up, month after month, year after year.