Man after man said that.
"We should have gone much farther except for the mud."
Along the Menin road there were wayside dressing stations for wounded,
with surgeons at work, and I saw the same scenes there. They were not
beyond the danger zone. Doctors and orderlies were killed by long-
range shells. Wounded were wounded again or finished off. Some
ambulances were blown to bits. A colonel who had been standing in talk
with a doctor was killed halfway through a sentence.
There was never a day in which Ypres was not shelled by long-range
high velocities which came howling overhead as I heard them scores of
times in passing through those ruins with gas-mask at the alert,
according to orders, and steel hat strapped on, and a deadly sense of
nostalgia because of what was happening in the fields of horror that
lay beyond. Yet to the soldier farther up the Menin road Ypres was
sanctuary and God's heaven.
The little old town of Cassel on the hill--where once a Duke of York
marched up and then marched down again--was beyond shell-range, though
the enemy tried to reach it and dropped twelve-inch shells (which make
holes deep enough to bury a coach and horses) round its base.
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