Judging by these sounds and those we heard afterwards, we must have been now on the outer edge of a line of fire stretching west and east and following the course of the Scheldt. The Germans were entrenched behind the river. In the little hamlet we asked our way of a peasant. As far as we could make out from his mixed French and Flemish, he told us to turn back and take the road we had left where it goes south to the village of Baerlaere. This we did. We gathered that we could get a road through Baerlaere to Schoonard. Failing Schoonard, our way to Zele lay through Baerlaere in the opposite direction. We set off along a very bad road to Baerlaere. Coming into Baerlaere, we saw a house with a remarkable roof, a steep-pitched roof of black and white tiles arranged in a sort of chequer-board pattern. I asked Mr. L. if he had ever seen a roof like that in his life and he replied promptly, "Yes; in China." And that roof--if it was coming into Baerlaere that we saw it--is all that I can remember of Baerlaere. There was, I suppose, the usual church with its steeple where the streets forked and the usual town hall near it, with a flight of steps before the door and a three-cornered classic pediment; and the usual double line of flat-fronted, grey-shuttered houses; I do seem to remember these things as if they had really been there, but you couldn't see the bottom half of the houses for the troops that were crowded in front of them, or the top half for the shells you tried to see and didn't. They were sweeping high up over the roofs, making for the entrenchments and the batteries beyond the village. We had come bang into the middle of an artillery duel. It was going on at a range of about a mile and a half, but all over our heads, so that though we heard it with great intensity, we saw nothing. There were intervals of a few seconds between the firing. The Belgian [? French] batteries were pounding away on the left quite near (the booming seemed to come from behind the houses at our backs), and the German on the right, farther away.