Listen. Stand with me at the Menin Gate of Ypres and listen. Through a cutting a train is roaring on its way. Rapidly it rises in a great swelling crescendo as it dashes into the open, and then its journey stops on some giant battlement--stops in a peal of deafening thunder just overhead. The shell has burst, and the echoes in that town of death die slowly away--reverberating like a sullen sea that lashes against a rock-bound coast. And yet what does it convey to anyone who patronises inebriated bath-chair men? ... Similarly--shrapnel! "The Germans were searching the road with 'whizz-bangs.'" A common remark, an ordinary utterance in a letter, taken by fond parents as an unpleasing affair such as the cook giving notice. Come with me to a spot near Ypres; come, and we will take our evening walk together. "They're a bit lively farther up the road, sir." The corporal of military police stands gloomily at a cross-roads, his back against a small wayside shrine. A passing shell unroofed it many weeks ago; it stands there surrounded by debris--the image of the Virgin, chipped and broken. Just a little monument of desolation in a ruined country, but pleasant to lean against when it's between you and German guns. Let us go on, it's some way yet before we reach the dug-out by the third dead horse. In front of us stretches a long, straight road, flanked on each side by poplars. In the middle there is pave. At intervals, a few small holes, where the stones have been shattered and hurled away by a bursting shell and only the muddy grit remains hollowed out to a depth of two feet or so, half-full of water. At the bottom an empty tin of bully, ammunition clips, numbers of biscuits--sodden and muddy. Altogether a good obstacle to take with the front wheel of a car at night. A little farther on, beside the road, in a ruined, desolate cottage two men are resting for a while, smoking. The dirt and mud of the trenches is thick on them, and one of them is contemplatively scraping his boot with his knife and fork. Otherwise, not a soul, not a living soul in sight; though away to the left front, through glasses, you can see two people, a man and a woman, labouring in the fields. And the only point of interest about them is that between you and them run the two motionless, stagnant lines of men who for months have faced one another. Those two labourers are on the other side of the German trenches.