Day by day two years ago I used to see Dickebusch in clouds of smoke, and hated to go through the place. They shelled separate farmhouses and isolated barns until they became bits of oddly standing brick about great holes. They shelled the roads down which our transports came at night, and communication-trenches up which our men moved to the front lines, and gun-positions revealed by every flash, and dug-outs foolishly frail against their frightful 5·9's, which in early days we could only answer with a few pip-squeaks. Yet by some extraordinary freak, not certainly by any kind of charity, for that does not belong to war, there were places they failed to shell, though they were clearly visible--little groups of Flemish cottages with flaming red tiles, a big old house here or there with pointed roofs rising above a screen of poplar-trees, fields still cultivated, as I saw them yesterday, by old Flemish women who bent over the beetroots and hung out washing under German eyes and German guns, and went up and down with plough-horses close to our gun-positions, and sold bad beer to English soldiers glad of any kind of beer in places where death was imminent and where, as they drank, the glass might be smashed out of their hand by a flying scythe or a yard of wall.
"Why do you stay here?" I asked an old woman in Plug Street village a year and a half ago. Four children played about her, though at the time shells were whining overhead and crashing but half a field away. "It is my home," she said, and thought that a good enough answer.
"How about the children?" I asked, and she said, "It's their home, and we earn a little money."
Even when this last battle began those peasants still remained encircled by our batteries and with German crumps falling about their fields; blear-eyed old men gazed up to the sky, watched the flame-bursts of the mines, then turned to their earth again; and the battle itself was heralded at dawn by the crowing of cocks in little farmsteads somewhere down by Kemmel. Chanticleer sounded the battle-charge with his clarion note, as in old dawns when English and French knights were drawn in line of battle.
An officer who was with me in Wytschaete Wood, looked down at these old places where he had lived in the menace of death, and remembered his escapes; that time when the back of his dug-out was hit by a huge shell as he sat in his pyjamas, smoking a cigarette; and that other time when his servant was buried alive quite close to him, and the nights and days under constant shell-fire. But these little homesteads in or about the salient are few in their strange escape, and elsewhere there is not a building which stands unpierced or in more than a fragment of ruin. Young officers of ours lived within these ruins wondering whether it would be this day or next, now, as they spoke, or in the silence that followed, that some beastly shell would burst through and tear down the Kirchner prints which they had pinned to broken timbers, and smash the bits of mirror they used for shaving-glasses and lay them out in the wreckage. When he goes home on leave and sits at his own hearthside these dream-pictures come back to him with their old horror, as to thousands of men who have fought in the salient, like those London boys I met one night in Ypres cooking cocoa under shell-fire, like those King's Royal Riflemen I saw going up to a counter-attack after the first attack by "flammenwerfer," and the padre who went up to the canal bank at night and found five dead men in a Red Cross hut and not a soul alive about him, and the Canadians who fought through a storm of shells in Maple Copse.
