Down below in the cellars was a crowd of poor people, mostly women and girls, and when the shell-fire was at its height their wailing and their prayers were rather troublesome to the Wessex boy and his comrades upstairs bandaging the wounded. The R.A.M.C. men, at most deadly risk to themselves, managed to clear most of the cellars, carrying out the people on shutters, and taking them away in ambulances to hospitals. To one of these casualty clearing-stations was brought a boy of nineteen, who had been gassed. He was a life-long paralytic and wizened like an old man, and deaf and dumb. Nobody knew where he had come from or to whom he belonged, but he had one creature faithful to him. It was a small dog, who came on the stretcher with him, sitting on his chest. It watched close to him when he lay in the hospital, and went away with him, sitting on his chest again, when he was sent farther away to another clearing-station. This dog's fidelity to the paralysed boy, who was deaf and dumb and gassed, seems to men who have seen many sights of war and this agony in Armentières the most pitiful thing they know. Yesterday, apart from the knocking of anti-aircraft guns and the drone of our planes, it was all quiet there, and I walked through the silent streets over the broken bricks and glass, and was startled by the utter death of the town. For this quietude and ruin of a place that one has seen full of life gives one a sinister sensation, and one is frightened by one's loneliness. XV THE BATTLE OF MENIN ROAD SEPTEMBER 20