France is superb.  In the parlance of the man in the street, we all “take off our hats” to this valiant country.

I could tell of the most horrible things possible for human mind to conceive.  I have seen things that, put in type, would sicken the reader.  I do not want to tell of these things here, evidence of them can be had from any official document or blue-book.  And yet, in justice to Belgium, I must tell some of the least dreadful of the things I have seen and only those that have come to me through personal experience.  I do not tell from hearsay, and I tell the truth without exaggeration.

In common with thousands of other Canadian and Imperial soldiers I saw the evacuation and destruction of Ypres.  On the morning of April 21, 1915, we marched along the Ypres-Menin road, which road was the key to Calais, to Paris, to London and to New York.  We marched along in the early hours of the morning, just after dawn.  To our left passed a continuous stream of refugees.  We looked toward them as we went by.  We saluted as they passed, but many of us had dimmed vision.

We had heard of German atrocities.  We had seen an isolated case or two as we marched from town to town and village to village.  We had not paid a great deal of attention to them, as we had considered such things the work of some drunken German soldier who had run riot and defied the orders of the officers.  Though we had certainly seen one or more cases that had impressed us very deeply.  The case I cited earlier in this book never left my thoughts.  But here on the king’s highway, we saw German atrocities on exhibition for the first time.  I say exhibition, and public exhibition, because it was the first time we had seen atrocities in bulk—­in numbers—­in hundreds.

Ypres had been destroyed in seven hours, after a continuous bombardment from one thousand German guns.  It was a city of the dead.  The military authorities of the Allies told the civilians they must leave.  They had to go, there was no alternative.  The liberation they had hoped for was in sight, but their road to it was of a roughness unspeakable.

There was the grandfather in that procession, and the grandmother,—­sometimes she was a crippled old body who could not walk.  Sometimes she was wheeled in a barrow surrounded by a few bundles of household treasure.  Sometimes a British wagon would pass piled high with old women and sick, to whom the soldiers were giving a lift on their way.

There was the mother in that procession.  Sometimes she would have a bundle, sometimes she would have a basket with a few broken pieces of food.  There was a young child, the baby hardly able to toddle and clinging to the mother’s skirts.  There was the young brother, the little fellow, whimpering a little perhaps at the noise and confusion and terror which his tiny brain could not grasp.  There was the baby, the baby which used to be plump and smiling and round and pinky white, now held convulsively by the mother to her breast, its little form thin and worn because of lack of nourishment.