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Was it fear, or an act of
sacrifice? I wondered if he would be killed that night. Men were
killed most nights on the way through Ypres, sometimes a few and
sometimes many. One shell killed thirty one night, and their bodies
lay strewn, headless and limbless, at the corner of the Grande Place.
Transport wagons galloped their way through, between bursts of shell-
fire, hoping to dodge them, and sometimes not dodging them. I saw the
litter of their wheels and shafts, and the bodies of the drivers, and
the raw flesh of the dead horses that had not dodged them. Many men
were buried alive in Ypres, under masses of masonry when they had been
sleeping in cellars, and were wakened by the avalanche above them.
Comrades tried to dig them out, to pull away great stones, to get down
to those vaults below from which voices were calling; and while they
worked other shells came and laid dead bodies above the stones which
had entombed their living comrades. That happened, not once or twice,
but many times in Ypres.


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