One had come to realise what men had meant who in earlier days on the Somme—when all was said to be quiet at Ypres—had trekked south into the Valley of the Shadow of Death and remarked that “it was better than the Salient.” Now we had seen for ourselves. It had not merely been the shelling and the fact that there was not a really safe spot, except in the very ramparts of the Eastern wall themselves, between Belgian Battery Corner and the front line. It had not merely been that the German gunners conveyed the impression that they were _aiming_ at _you_, that they knew exactly where you were, and that they were doing it—had been doing it all along—more as a pleasure than as an allotted task. It had not been the fact that no fatigue or waggon-line party could set great hopes on returning scatheless from a job of work; nor that here hostile aeroplane observation seemed more acute than in other parts; nor again that rarely a night passed but one saw or heard of some shambles on a main traffic road. It was none of these things. The spirit of Ypres was abroad, impregnating those new to her. From the very morning when, accompanying a harassed, jumpy acting C.R.A. on his round of battery inspections, I had first seen her, I had felt the spell upon me. It was like grey skies and a wind in the east, the quintessence of sombreness. The intervals of quiet could not be called peace; they served only to intensify the solitude. The history of the place seemed to cast its stamp on those who sojourned in it. [Illustration: A street in Ypres. ] [Illustration: The Cloth Hall in 1917. ] [Illustration: The Menin Gate of Ypres. ] We had come into action at the beginning of July. Our instructions had been to get “in” and camouflaged and registered and then wait for “the day,” and that waiting had been sorely trying to the patience. It had been far worse than sitting on the Messines Ridge in June. We had been told we should be “silent,” but we had fired steadily nevertheless, and this meant, of course, more ammunition and added risk of casualties amongst horses and men. It had meant having the men out of cover to shift the shells from their depôts to the gun-pits; and such things were considerations when we were losing men at the rate of about two a day and the stock of capable gunners and N.C.O.’s, depleted at Messines, was beginning to run dangerously low. “D” Battery on our immediate right had had an even worse time. Poor old “D.” They were always getting the rough of it since Courcelette, and this time they had got it very rough indeed. They had had no cellar to put their gun-crews in and we had been unable to spare them a share in ours, so they had left emergency crews at the guns and worked them by nucleus shifts, the remainder sleeping a long way behind.