At Ypres with Best-Dunkley | Page 8

2.30 we steamed into Hazebrouck. I noticed a long hospital train standing in the station, full of wounded who were being taken to the Base hospitals. Those who were in a condition to do so looked very pleased with life.
I reported to the R.T.O. in the square at Hazebrouck, and he gave me instructions to go by the next train to Poperinghe. It was a sultry day and I was glad of a drink. I managed to get one on the station. I could occasionally hear the rumble of the guns in the distance now, but very faint.
The train left Hazebrouck at 3.30 p.m. The country looked as calm and peaceful as anything. The only signs which suggested war were the German prisoners at the side of the railway and the numerous dumps. But we drew nearer to the Front. The train halted at Abeele, a village near the frontier of France and Flanders. As we stopped here for a few minutes a number of us managed to dash into an estaminet opposite the station and get a drink! From Abeele onwards the most noticeable objects were the aeroplanes which were now very numerous above us, the presence of which indicated our proximity to the war.
At 6.30 the train came to a standstill in a station which I was informed was my destination, Poperinghe. "This is the railhead for the Ypres Salient" I was told. So out I got with my kit. I was expected. There was a mess cart awaiting me at the station; and in it I jogged along to the Transport Lines which were in the vicinity of Brandhoek a mile or so further on--on the left of the road from Poperinghe to Ypres.
The transport driver told me what it was like in that part, how it had been very quiet when the 55th Division took over their positions in the Salient from the 29th Division the previous autumn, but had grown more lively every day; how they had received a nasty gas bombardment only a few days ago, how the Boche had recently taken to shelling us furiously and systematically every night, and how there were some very hot times ahead--there was to be a raid by a battalion in our brigade that night.
It was fairly quiet when I arrived--it was a time of the day when things generally were somewhat quiet, when the guns were resting before joining in the nightly fray--so I did not immediately notice how near to the war I had come. But I was soon to realize it.
When I reached the Transport Lines I made the acquaintance of two officers of the 2/5th Lancashire Fusiliers of whom I was destined to see much in the coming months, Philip Cave Humfrey and Joseph Roake--especially Roake, as it was his good fortune to remain with the Battalion until long after the cessation of hostilities and to be with me in the 15th Lancashire Fusiliers in the Army of the Rhine. Humfrey, by a curious coincidence, turned out--though I did not know it until many months after--to be the brother-in-law of my school-friend William Lindop!
Never shall I forget that summer evening near Brandhoek. Roake, effervescing as always with droll wit, and Humfrey, with his natural cheerfulness and affability, made me at home in their little hut at once. I can well recall the scene: a tiny little wooden hut at the edge of a large field; the wall adorned by a trench map of the Ypres Salient, on which our present position was marked in pencil, and a striking group photo of the Imperial War Cabinet, taken out of an illustrated journal, in which the well-known faces of Lloyd George and Lord Curzon seemed to dominate the picture; a little table upon which Humfrey drafted a signal message to the Adjutant of the 2/5th, announcing my arrival and asking for instructions, the table upon which an excellent little dinner was almost immediately served; outside the observation balloons in a curved line, denoting the Salient, and aircraft sweeping through the skies.
It was then that I first saw what was going to be to me a very common sight during those memorable "Wipers days"--an air fight. I had not been in the little wooden hut many minutes before Roake called me out to watch a scrap between British and German aeroplanes over the Salient. We got out our field-glasses and, in the cool of a summer's evening, when any ordinary individual in "Blighty" would be relaxing from the labours of the day in cricket or in tennis, we surveyed with interest the contests between the chivalrous heroes of the air far above. It was then that I first saw a "blazing trail across the evening sky of Flanders." There were many such in the summer of