Round about Furnes there was a fog in the war zone.  In the early dawn until the morning had passed, and then again as the dusk fell and the mists crept along the canals and floated over the flat fields, men groped about it like ghosts, with ghostly guns.

Shells came hurtling out of the veil of the mist and burst in places which seemed hidden behind cotton-wool.  An unseen enemy was killing unseen men, and other guns replied into this grim, grey mystery, not knowing what destruction was being done.

It was like the war itself, which was utterly shrouded in these parts by a fog of mystery.  Watching it close at hand (when things are more difficult to sort into any order of logic) my view was clouded and perplexed by the general confusion.  A few days previously, it seemed that the enemy had abandoned his attack upon the coast-line and the country between Dixmude and Nieuport.  There was a strange silence behind the mists, but our aeroplanes, reconnoitring the enemy’s lines, were able to see movements of troops drifting southwards towards the region round Ypres.

Now there was an awakening of guns in places from which they seemed to be withdrawn.  Dixmude, quiet in its ruins, trembled again, and crumbled a little more, under the vibration of the enemy’s shells, firing at long range towards the Franco-Belgian troops.

Here and there, near Pervyse and Ramscapelle, guns, not yet located, fired “pot shots” on the chance of killing something—­soldiers or civilians, or the wounded on their stretchers.

Several of them came into Furnes, bursting quite close to the convent, and one smashed into the Hotel de la Noble Rose, going straight down a long corridor and then making a great hole in a bedroom wall.  Some of the officers of the Belgian staff were in the room downstairs, but not a soul was hurt.

French and Belgian patrols thrusting forward cautiously found themselves under rifle-fire from the enemy’s trenches which had previously appeared abandoned.  Something like an offensive developed again, and it was an unpleasant surprise when Dixmude was retaken by the Germans.

As a town its possession was not of priceless value to the enemy.  They had retaken a pitiful ruin, many streets of skeleton houses filled with burnt-out ashes, a Town Hall with gaping holes in its roof, an archway which thrust up from a wreck of pillars like a gaunt rib, and a litter of broken glass, bricks and decomposed bodies.

If they had any pride in the capture it was the completeness of their destruction of this fine old Flemish town.

But it was a disagreeable thing that the enemy, who had been thrust back from this place and the surrounding neighbourhood, and who had abandoned their attack for a time in this region, should have made such a sudden hark-back in sufficient strength to regain ground which was won by the Belgian and French at the cost of many thousands of dead and wounded.