"De Zaeydydt started and bullets whizzed through the air and exploded. He reached the tree, got mixed up in the branches, and rolled on the ground. I thought he had been hit and I shuddered. He got up again, cleared the tree, and disappeared. I said to myself, 'My dear boy, you are too short to scale that. You had better go round the tree again and the house.' 'Marteau,' I called out, 'I am going to start. Follow me.' I sprang out. Marteau followed me and there was a shower of bullets, but our hour had not yet come--and we got through safely. "We were very soon in the French trenches and the soldiers welcomed us heartily. They had not expected to see us again. Our return journey, from the time we had seen the first bullet to the last one, had taken an hour and twenty minutes. Ah, I forgot to tell you that we had taken notes on the map and from the last 'e' of Kaesteelhoek, there was a gleam from a Boche battery. That battery will hear from us to-morrow!" The beefsteak and the coffee now put in an appearance, and our Captain started on his meal like a wolf that had been starving for a fortnight in the snow. He is now sleeping and I am noting down this souvenir of the war, by the side of a fire which is smoking badly, as it is raining and raining outdoors.... * * * * * December 6, 1914. Great joy at our battery. Our Captain has received the Order of Leopold for his fine reconnaissance, November 28, 1914, on the Yser. CHAPTER XXX The Irony of Fate By M. Sadsawska, Civic Guard, Motorcyclist of the 1st Line Regiment We were occupying the Dixmude Sector. Our trenches were hollowed out in the road which skirts the Yser, and the Regiment was sheltering in the centre of a vast horseshoe-shaped curl, traced by the river among the meadow grasses. The scenery was dolefully sad. Beyond a row of century-old trees, or rather of poor trunks of trees bewailing their scathed branches, which seemed to be mounting guard around our shelters, the ruins of a railway bridge stood out, half hidden in the water. On the embankment, surrounded by broken and twisted telegraph poles, and festoons of wires and cables all mixed up, lay a powerful locomotive, which had been overturned, so that its wheels were in the air. The melancholiness of the site did not disturb our equanimity at all. We were full of hopefulness and quite ready to march on towards the piles of fallen roofs, gaping houses, and tottering walls of strange shapes, which now constituted Dixmude, our old Flemish city. In the misty twilight, it seemed to us as though the poor town were stretching out its mutilated arms to us, and as though the murmur of the wind in the ruins were hailing us. "Courage, courage, come!" it seemed to say.