Our road ran through the “Bois Triangulaire,” a bit of woodland exposed to constant shelling.  Half the poor spindling trees were down, and patches of blackened undergrowth and ragged hollows marked the path of the shells.  If the trees of a cannonaded wood are of strong inland growth their fallen trunks have the majesty of a ruined temple; but there was something humanly pitiful in the frail trunks of the Bois Triangulaire, lying there like slaughtered rows of immature troops.

A few miles more brought us to Nieuport, most lamentable of the victim towns.  It is not empty as Ypres is empty:  troops are quartered in the cellars, and at the approach of our motor knots of cheerful zouaves came swarming out of the ground like ants.  But Ypres is majestic in death, poor Nieuport gruesomely comic.  About its splendid nucleus of mediaeval architecture a modern town had grown up; and nothing stranger can be pictured than the contrast between the streets of flimsy houses, twisted like curl-papers, and the ruins of the Gothic Cathedral and the Cloth Market.  It is like passing from a smashed toy to the survival of a prehistoric cataclysm.

Modern Nieuport seems to have died in a colic.  No less homely image expresses the contractions and contortions of the houses reaching out the appeal of their desperate chimney-pots and agonized girders.  There is one view along the exterior of the town like nothing else on the warfront.  On the left, a line of palsied houses leads up like a string of crutch-propped beggars to the mighty ruin of the Templars’ Tower; on the right the flats reach away to the almost imperceptible humps of masonry that were once the villages of St. Georges, Ramscappelle, Pervyse.  And over it all the incessant crash of the guns stretches a sounding-board of steel.

In front of the cathedral a German shell has dug a crater thirty feet across, overhung by splintered tree-trunks, burnt shrubs, vague mounds of rubbish; and a few steps beyond lies the peacefullest spot in Nieuport, the grave-yard where the zouaves have buried their comrades.  The dead are laid in rows under the flank of the cathedral, and on their carefully set grave-stones have been placed collections of pious images gathered from the ruined houses.  Some of the most privileged are guarded by colonies of plaster saints and Virgins that cover the whole slab; and over the handsomest Virgins and the most gaily coloured saints the soldiers have placed the glass bells that once protected the parlour clocks and wedding-wreaths in the same houses.

From sad Nieuport we motored on to a little seaside colony where gaiety prevails.  Here the big hotels and the adjoining villas along the beach are filled with troops just back from the trenches:  it is one of the “rest cures” of the front.  When we drove up, the regiment “au repos” was assembled in the wide sandy space between the principal hotels, and in the centre of the jolly crowd the band was playing.  The Colonel and his officers