But, up there you saw the whole war. . . . Infinite miles away, over the sullied land that the enemy forces held: into Germany proper. Presumably you could breathe in Germany proper. . . . Over your right shoulder you could see a stump of a tooth. The Cloth Hall at Ypres: at an angle of 50° below. . . . Dark lines behind it. . . . The German trenches before Wytschaete! ... That was before the great mines had blown Wytschaete to hell. . . . But--every half-minute by his wrist-watch--white puffs of cotton-wool existed on the dark lines--the German trenches before Wytschaete. Our artillery practice. . . . Good shooting. Jolly good shooting! Miles and miles away to the left . . . beneath the haze of light that, on a clouded day, the sea threw off, a shaft of sunlight fell, and was reflected in a grey blur. . . . It was the glass roofs of a great airplane shelter! A great plane, the largest he had then seen, was moving over, behind his back, with four little planes as an escort. . . . Over the vast slag-heaps by Béthune. . . . High, purplish-blue heaps, like the steam domes of engines or the breasts of women. . . . Bluish purple. More blue than purple. . . . Like all Franco-Belgian Gobelins tapestry. . . . And all quiet. . . . Under the vast pall of quiet cloud! . . . There were shells dropping in Poperinghe. . . . Five miles out, under his nose. . . . The shells dropped. White vapour rose and ran away in plumes. . . . What sort of shells? . . . There were twenty different kinds of shells. . . . The Huns were shelling Poperinghe! A senseless cruelty. It was five miles behind the line! Prussian brutality. . . . There were two girls who kept a tea-shop in Poperinghe. . . . High coloured. . . . General Plumer had liked them . . . a fine old general. . . . The shells had killed them both . . . Any man might have slept with either of them with pleasure and profit. . . . Six thousand of H.M. officers must have thought the same about those high-coloured girls. Good girls! . . . But the Hun shells got them. . . . What sort of fate was that? . . . To be desired by six thousand men and smashed into little gobbets of flesh by Hun shells? It appeared to be mere Prussianism--the senseless cruelty of the Hun!--to shell Poperinghe. An innocent town with a tea-shop five miles behind Ypres. . . . Little noiseless plumes of smoke rising under the quiet blanketing of the pale maroon skies, with the haze from the aeroplane shelters, and the great aeroplanes over the Béthune slag-heaps. . . . What a dreadful name--Béthune. . . . Probably, however, the Germans had heard that we were massing men in Poperinghe. It was reasonable to shell a town where men were being assembled. . . . Or we might have been shelling one of their towns with an Army H.Q. in it. So they shelled Poperinghe in the silent grey day. . . .