The word was that we were to go to Vlamertinghe, where the Zeppelins had bombed us in our huts. It lay well below threatened Ypres.
We of Number One Company passed Belle-waarde Lake, with its old dug-outs and its smells, and struck off across the fields, the better to avoid the heavy barrage fire which made all movement of troops difficult beyond words. We reached the railroad up and down which in quieter times the battalion had been wont to march to and fro to the Polygon Wood trenches.
The fire became heavier here and the going was rough so that what with the burden of packs which seemed to weigh a ton and all other things; we moved in a mass, as sheep do. When slung rifles jostled packs, good friends cursed one another both loud and long. This was trench nerves.
Shortly, we ran into a solid wall of barrage fire. The officer commanding the company halted us. We were for pushing on to that rest each aching bone and muscle, each tight-stretched and shell-dazed nerve fairly screamed aloud for. But he was adamant. We cursed him. He pretended not to hear. This also was trench nerves.
It was growing late. The star shells became fewer. The search-lights ceased altogether. In half an hour those keen eyes in distant trees and steeples would have marked us down--and what good then the agony of this all-night march? Better to have been killed back there in Belle-waarde. We were still a good two miles from Ypres town.
The officer literally drove us back over the way we had come. His orders had anticipated this eventuality so that rather than force the passage of the barrage fire, merely for a rest, we should rest here where no rest was to be had. Undoubtedly, if we had been "going up" it would have been different. We should have gone on--no fire would have stopped us.
[Illustration: BRITISH WOUNDED WAITING FOR TRANSPORTATION TO A DRESSING STATION.]
[Illustration: THE PRINCESS PATRICIAS IN BILLETS AT WESTOUTRE, BELGIUM. ON TOP OF WAGON IN FOREGROUND IS "KNIFE-REST" TYPE OF WIRE ENTANGLEMENTS.]
The half hour limit brought us to a murky daylight and an old and sloppy support trench which bordered the track and into which we flung ourselves, to lay in the water in a dull stupor that was neither sleep nor honest waking.