The day after we arrived I was once more back in Belgium with a message to the C.R.A.[24] at Neuve Eglise.  I had last been in Belgium on August 23, the day we left Dour.

The general might have been posing for a war artist.  He was seated at a table in the middle of a field, his staff-captain with him.  The ground sloped away to a wooded valley in which two or three batteries, carefully concealed, were blazing away.  To the north shrapnel was bursting over Kemmel.  In front the Messines ridge was almost hidden with the smoke of our shells.  I felt that each point of interest ought to have been labelled in Mr Frederic Villiers’ handwriting—­“German shrapnel bursting over Kemmel—­our guns—­this is a dead horse.”

I first saw Ypres on the 6th November.  I was sent off with a bundle of routine matter to the 1st Corps, then at Brielen, a couple of miles N.W. of Ypres.  It was a nightmare ride.  The road was pave in the centre—­villainous pave.  At the side of it were glutinous morasses about six feet in width, and sixteen inches deep.  I started off with two 2nd Corps motor-cyclists.  There was an almost continuous line of transport on the road—­motor-lorries that did not dare deviate an inch from the centre of the road for fear of slipping into the mire, motor ambulances, every kind of transport, and some infantry battalions.  After following a column of motor-lorries a couple of miles—­we stuck twice in trying to get past the rearmost lorry—­we tried the road by Dranoutre and Locre.  But these country lanes were worse of surface than the main road—­greasy pave is better that greasy rocks—­and they were filled with odd detachments of French artillery.  The two 2nd Corps motor-cyclists turned back.  I crawled on at the risk of smashing my motor-cycle and myself, now skidding perilously between waggons, now clogging up, now taking to the fields, now driving frightened pedestrians off what the Belgians alone would call a footpath.  I skidded into a subaltern, and each of us turned to curse, when—­it was Gibson, a junior “Greats” don at Balliol, and the finest of fellows.

Beyond Dickebusch French artillery were in action on the road.  The houses just outside Ypres had been pelted with shrapnel but not destroyed.  Just by the station, which had not then been badly knocked about, I learnt where to go.  Ypres was the first half-evacuated town I had entered.  It was like motor-cycling into a village from Oxford very early on a Sunday morning.  Half an hour later I saw the towers of the city rising above a bank of mist which had begun to settle on the ground:  then out rose great clouds of black smoke.

I came back by Poperinghe to avoid the grease and crowding of the direct road, and there being no hurry I stopped at an inn for a beefsteak.  The landlord’s daughter talked of the many difficulties before us, and doubted of our success.  I said, grandiloquently enough, that no victory was worth winning unless there were difficulties.  At which she smiled and remarked, laughing—­