There was a Town Major of Ypres. Men said it was a sentence of death
to any officer appointed to that job. I think one of them I met had
had eleven predecessors. He sat in a cellar of the old prison, with
walls of sandbags on each side of him, but he could not sit there very
long at a stretch, because it was his duty to regulate the traffic
according to the shell-fire. He kept a visitors' book as a hobby,
until it was buried under piles of prison, and was a hearty, cheerful
soul, in spite of the menace of death always about him.
VIII
My memory goes back to a strange night in Ypres in those early days.
It was Gullett, the Australian eyewitness, afterward in Palestine, who
had the idea.
"It would be a great adventure," he said, as we stood listening to the
gun-fire over there.
"It would be damn silly," said a staff officer. "Only a stern sense of
duty would make me do it."
It was Gullett who was the brave man.
We took a bottle of Cointreau and a sweet cake as a gift to any
battalion mess we might find in the ramparts, and were sorry for
ourselves when we failed to find it, nor, for a long time, any living
soul.
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