enemy’s lines.  The artillerymen were leisurely at their work, handling their shells with interludes of conversation.  At luncheon time they lay about behind the guns smoking cigarettes, and I was glad, for each of their shots seemed to wreck my own brain.  At a neighbouring village things were more lively.  The enemy was turning his fire this way.  A captive balloon had signalled the position, and shrapnels were bursting close.  One shell tore up a great hole near the railway line.

Shell after shell fell upon one dung-heap—­mistaken perhaps for a company of men.  Shrapnel bullets pattered into the roadway, a piece of jagged shell fell with a clatter.

My own chauffeur—­a young man of very cool nerve and the best driver I have known—­picked it up with a grin, and then dropped it, with a sharp cry.  It was almost red-hot.  The flames of the enemy’s batteries could be seen stabbing through a fringe of trees, perhaps two kilometres away, by Pervyse.  Their shells were making puff-balls of smoke over neighbouring farms, and for miles round I could see the clouds stretching out into long, thin wisps.  The air throbbed with horrible concussions, the dull full boom of big guns, the sharp staccato of the smaller shell, and the high singing note of it as it came soaring overhead.  Gradually one began to realize the boredom of battle, to acquire some of that fantastic indifference to the chance of death which enables the soldiers to stir their soup without an upward glance at a skyful of jagged steel.  Only now and then the old question came to one, “This—­or the next?”

It was only the adventure of searching out the wounded that broke the monotony for the Belgian ambulance men.  At first they were not hard to find—­they were crowded upon the straw in cottage parlours, cleared of all but the cheap vases on the mantelshelf and family photographs tacked upon walls that had not been built for the bloody mess of tragedy which they now enclosed.  On their bodies they bore the signs of the tremendous accuracy of the enemy’s artillery, and by their number, increasing during the day, one could guess at the tragic endurance of the Belgian infantry in the ring of iron which was closing upon them; drawing just a little nearer by half a village or half a road as the hours passed.  The ambulances carried them away to the station of Fortem, where those who could still sit up were packed into a steam tram, and where the stretcher-cases were taken to the civil hospital at Furnes by motor transport.  But in outlying farmsteads in the zone of fire, and in isolated cottages which had been struck by a chance shot, were other wounded men difficult to get.  It was work for scouting cars, and too dangerous for ambulances.

Some volunteers made several journeys down the open roads to places not exactly suitable for dalliance.  Lieutenant de Broqueville called upon me for this purpose several times because I had a fast little car.  I was glad of the honour, though when he pointed to a distant roof where a wounded man was reported to be lying, it looked to me a long, long way in the zone of fire.  Two houses blown to pieces by the side of a ditch showed that the enemy’s shells were dropping close, and it was a test of nerves to drive deliberately through the flat fields with sharp, stabbing flashes on their frontiers, and right into the middle of an infernal tumult of guns.