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Against the first vivid brightness of it the lines of trees along the
roads to Hooge were silhouetted as black as ink, and the fields
between Ypres and the trenches were flooded with a milky luminance.
The whole shape of the salient was revealed to us in those flashes. We
could see all those places for which our soldiers fought and died. We
stared across the fields beyond the Menin road toward the Hooge
crater, and those trenches which were battered to pieces but not
abandoned in the first battle of Ypres and the second battle.
That salient was, even then, in 1915, a graveyard of British soldiers-
-there were years to follow when many more would lie there--and as
between flash and flash the scene was revealed, I seemed to see a
great army of ghosts, the spirits of all those boys who had died on
this ground. It was the darkness, and the tumult of guns, and our
loneliness here on the ramparts, which put an edge to my nerves and
made me see unnatural things.
No wonder a sentry was startled when he saw our two figures
approaching him through a clump of trees.


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