Energy books

IX

The worst school of war for the sons of gentlemen was, in those early
days, and for long afterward, Hooge. That was the devil's playground
and his chamber of horrors, wherein he devised merry tortures for
young Christian men. It was not far out of Ypres, to the left of the
Menin road, and to the north of Zouave Wood and Sanctuary Wood. For a
time there was a chateau there called the White Chateau, with
excellent stables and good accommodation for one of our brigade
staffs, until one of our generals was killed and others wounded by a
shell, which broke up their conference. Afterward there was no
chateau, but only a rubble of bricks banked up with sandbags and deep
mine-craters filled with stinking water slopping over from the
Bellewarde Lake and low-lying pools. Bodies, and bits of bodies, and
clots of blood, and green metallic-looking slime, made by explosive
gases, were floating on the surface of that water below the crater
banks when I first passed that way, and so it was always.


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