After crawling out through the bleeding remnants of my
comrades, and through the smoke and debris, wandering and running in
the midst of the raging gun-fire in search of a refuge, I am now
awaiting death at any moment. You do not know what Flanders means.
Flanders means endless human endurance. Flanders means blood and
scraps of human bodies. Flanders means heroic courage and faithfulness
even unto death."
To British and to Germans it meant the same.
VI
During the four and a half months of that fighting the war
correspondents were billeted in the old town of Cassel, where, perched
on a hill which looks over a wide stretch of Flanders, through our
glasses we could see the sand-dunes beyond Dunkirk and with the naked
eyes the whole vista of the battle-line round Ypres and in the wide
curve all the countryside lying between Aire and Hazebrouck and Notre
Dame de Lorette. My billet was in a monastery for old priests, on the
eastern edge of the town, and at night my window was lighted by
distant shell-fire, and I gazed out to a sky of darkness rent by vivid
flashes, bursts of red flame, and rockets rising high.
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