Sooner or later almost every fighting unit of the B.E.F. had been moved to Ypres. Veterans, indeed, considered that no soldier had been properly “blooded” until he had taken his place in the line at the famous salient; and there were probably few soldiers with any length of service in France or Flanders who had not passed the traffic-man at the cross-roads leading to Hell Fire Corner, where the tide of motor ambulances ebbed and flowed so regularly. On the night of September 1 the 42nd Division passed through the Menin Gate on their way to the front trenches, now between four and five kilometres from the town. The Menin Road had been subjected to almost incessant shelling for more than two years. The German gunners had registered every square yard of it, and of every other road and track that led towards the front, and the men declared that if a large fly crossed the Menin Road in the daytime the Boche would at once put down a barrage of 6-inch shells. At night their guns would search every stretch of the road systematically on the chance—which was almost a certainty—of getting a bag. Night after night rations and ammunition were brought to the troops in the trenches through a hail of shells, which too often caught men, animals and vehicles and blotted them out. Night after night the roads were converted into shell-holes, but still the work of repairing them went on unceasingly; the gunners brought their teams along at the gallop; the transport men arrived with their precious loads and returned to pass through the inferno again, and often the ration limbers came back bearing burdens very different from those they had borne on the outward journey. And for every hundred struck by Death amid that never-ending hail of shells a thousand tricked him by hairbreadth escapes. At dawn there would often be a brief respite—a semblance, or rather a mockery, of peace. For an hour or two the crashes and rumblings ceased, as though the guns were pausing for breath through the very violence of their fury, and, while pausing, were plotting some still more devilish form of hate. [Sidenote: _The Ypres Salient_]