across the roadside ditch.  We drove more swiftly with empty cars and came into the streets of Dixmude.  They were sheets of fire, burning without flame but with a steady glow of embers.  They were but cracked shells of houses, unroofed and swept clean of their floors and furniture, so that all but the bare walls and a few charred beams had been consumed by the devouring appetite of fire.  Now and again one of the beams broke and fell with a crash into the glowing heart of the furnace, which had once been a Flemish house, raising a fountain of sparks.

Further into the town, however, there stood, by the odd freakishness of an artillery bombardment, complete houses hardly touched by shells and, very neat and prim, between masses of shapeless ruins.  One street into which I drove was so undamaged that I could hardly believe my eyes, having looked back the night before to one great torch which men called “Dixmude.”  Nevertheless some of its window-frames had bulged with heat, and panes of glass fell with a splintering noise on to the stone pavement.  As I passed a hail of shrapnel was suddenly flung upon the wall on one side of the street and the bullets played at marbles in the roadway.  In this street some soldiers were grouped about two wounded men, one of them only lightly touched, the other—­a French marine—­at the point of death, lying very still in a huddled way with a clay-coloured face smeared with blood.  We picked them up and put them into one of the ambulances, the dying man groaning a little as we strapped him on the stretcher.

The Belgian soldiers who had come into the town at dawn stood about our ambulances as though our company gave them a little comfort.  They did not speak much, but had grave wistful eyes like men tired of all this misery about them but unable to escape from it.  They were young men with a stubble of fair hair on their faces and many days’ dirt.

“Vous etes tres aimable,” said one of them when I handed him a cigarette, which he took with a trembling hand.  Then he stared up the street as another shower of shrapnel swept it, and said in a hasty way, “C’est l’enfer...  Pour trois mois je reste sous feu.  C’est trop, n’est-ce pas?”

But there was no time for conversation about war and the effects of war upon the souls of men.  The German guns were beginning to speak again, and unless we made haste we might not rescue the wounded men.

“Are there many blesses here?” asked our leader.

One of the soldiers pointed to a house which had a tavern sign above it.

“They’ve been taken inside,” he said.  “I helped to carry them.”  We dodged the litter in the roadway, where, to my amazement, two old ladies were searching in the rubbish-heaps for the relics of their houses.  They had stayed in Dixmude during this terrible bombardment, hidden in some cellar, and now had emerged, in their respectable black gowns, to see what damage had been done.  They seemed to be looking for something in particular—­some