I passed that day through the shell-stricken town of.  Ypres and wandered through the great tragedy of the Cloth Hall—­that old splendour in stone which was now a gaunt and ghastly ruin.  British soldiers were buying picture postcards at booths in the market-place, and none of them seemed to worry because at any moment another shell might come crashing across the shattered roofs with a new message of destruction.

Yet on all this journey of mine in the war zone of the British front for at least 100 kilometres or so there was no thrill or shock of war itself.  A little way off, on some parts of the road men were in the trenches facing the enemy only a few yards distant from their hiding-places.

The rumble of guns rolled sullenly now and then across the marshlands, and one knew intellectually, but not instinctively, that if one’s motor-car took the wrong turning and travelled a mile or two heedlessly, sudden death would call a halt.

And that was the strangeness of it all—­the strangeness that startled me as I drove back to the quietude of the General Headquarters, as darkness came down upon this low-lying countryside and put its cloak about the figures of British soldiers moving to their billets, and gave a ghostliness to the tall, tufted trees, which seemed to come striding towards my headlights.

In this siege warfare of the trenches there was a deadly stillness behind the front and a queer absence of war’s tumult and turmoil.  Yet all the time it was going on slowly, yard by yard, trench by trench, and somewhere along the front men were always fighting and dying.

“Gentlemen,” said a staff officer that night, “there has been good work to-day.  We have taken several lines of trenches, and the operation is proceeding very well.”

We bent over his map, following the line drawn by his finger, listening to details of a grim bit of work, glad that five hundred German prisoners had been taken that day.  As he spoke the window rattled, and we heard the boom of another gun...  The war was going on, though it had seemed so quiet at the front.

9

For several months there was comparative quietude at the British front after the tremendous attacks upon our lines at Soissons and Venizel and Vic-sur-Aisne, and the still more bloody battles round Ypres in the autumn of the first year of war.  Each side settled down for the winter campaign, and killing was done by continual artillery fire with only occasional bayonet charges between trench and trench.  That long period of dark wet days was the most tragic ordeal of our men, and a time when depression settled heavily upon their spirits, so that not all their courage could keep any flame of enthusiasm in their hearts for such fine words as honour and glory.