Equally cool must be the stretcher-bearer. Casualties had to be conveyed by hand carriage over the duckboard tracks before wheeled carriers could be used. Yet day and night the bearers kept a continuous stream of wounded flowing to the rear. The distance between the front and the region of comparative safety made the evacuation of the wounded a matter of difficulty. The Field Ambulances were, however, equal to their task, and though the Advanced Dressing Stations at Railway Dugout, Bavaria House, and Potijze Château were cramped for space and were frequently gassed and always shelled, all the wounded were dressed and got away. The pressure in rear was so great that some bandages were not changed until the men reached England. The Army Service Corps had a most trying time, but in spite of serious losses the supply services never failed. Reference has already been made to the dangerous and difficult work carried out so competently by the battalion transports. [Sidenote: _Depression_] The period at Ypres ended on a note of depression. One felt that the Division was beginning to doubt its ability to achieve the impossible. It was not the imminent menace of death from above in the form of shell or bomb, or from the trenches in front in the shape of machine-gun bullet. But the secrecy and furtiveness of every movement, the ghastliness of the abomination of desolation all around, the sickening sights and smells, the saturation of the whole terrain with gas to such an extent that men often preferred to lie out in the open under fire rather than risk suffocation in dug-outs—these combined to awaken a vague, inarticulate protest against the cruelty and futility of war. Had the men been able to get at those responsible for turning a peaceable countryside into something viler than any man’s imaginings of hell, indignation and righteous anger would have left little room for the depression generated by the sense of impotence—the beating one’s head against a concrete wall, the waste of effort and of lives thrown away in futile local assaults. The men were glad to quit the Ypres salient, but they did not leave it in a happy frame of mind. Every one felt that the Division was not at its best; that it was capable of better things had opportunity been given. [Illustration: FREZENBERG RIDGE.] [Illustration: YPRES. SQUARE FARM, USED AS BATTALION HEADQUARTERS AND AID POST.] [Illustration: NIEUPORT. THE FIVE BRIDGES AND R. YSER.] [Illustration: NIEUPORT. “THE REDAN.”] CHAPTER VII NIEUPORT (_October-November 1917_)