I had two more runs to the Ypres district before we left Locre.  On the first the road was tolerable to Ypres, though near the city I was nearly blown off my bicycle by the fire of a concealed battery of 75’s.  The houses at the point where the Rue de Lille enters the Square had been blown to bits.  The Cloth Hall had barely been touched.  In its glorious dignity it was beautiful.

Beyond Ypres, on the Hooge Road, I first experienced the extreme neighbourhood of a “J.J.”  It fell about 90 yards in front of me and 20 yards off the road.  It makes a curiously low droning sound as it falls, like the groan of a vastly sorrowful soul in hell,—­so I wrote at the time:  then there’s a gigantic rushing plunk and overwhelming crash as if all the houses in the world were falling.

On the way back the road, which had been fairly greasy, became practically impassable.  I struggled on until my lamp failed (sheer carelessness—­I ought to have seen to it before starting), and a gale arose which blew me all over the road.  So I left my motor-bicycle safely behind a cottage, and started tramping back to H.Q. by the light of my pocket flash-lamp.  It was a pitch-black night.  I was furiously hungry, and stopped at the first inn and gorged coffee with rum, and a large sandwich of bread and butter and fat bacon.  I had barely started again—­it had begun to pour—­when a car came along with a French staff-officer inside.  I stopped it, saying in hurried and weighty tones that I was carrying an important despatch (I had nothing on me, I am afraid, but a trifling bunch of receipts), and the rest of the way I travelled lapped luxuriously in soft furs.

The second time I rode along a frozen road between white fields.  All the shells sounded alarmingly near.  The noise in Ypres was terrific.  At my destination I came across some prisoners of the Prussian Guard, fierce and enormous men, nearly all with reddish hair, very sullen and rude.

From accounts that have been published of the first battle of Ypres, it might be inferred that the British Army knew it was on the point of being annihilated.  A despatch rider, though of course he does not know very much of the real meaning of the military situation, has unequalled opportunities for finding out the opinions and spirit of the men.  Now one of us went to Ypres every day and stopped for a few minutes to discuss the state of affairs with other despatch riders and with signal-sergeants.  Right through the battle we were confident; in fact the idea that the line might be broken never entered our heads.  We were suffering very heavily.  That we knew.  Nothing like the shell fire had ever been heard before.  Nobody realised how serious the situation must have been until the accounts were published.

Huggie has a perfect mania for getting frightened; so one day, instead of leaving the routine matter that he carried at a place whence it might be forwarded at leisure, he rode along the Menin road to the Chateau at Hooge, the headquarters of the 15th Brigade.  He came back quietly happy, telling us that he had had a good time, though the noise had been a little overwhelming.  We learned afterwards that the enemy had been registering very accurately upon the Hooge road.