For some weeks Tom was in the neighbourhood of Ypres without taking any part in the righting. During that time he got accustomed to the constant booming of the guns, and to the fact that any moment a shell might fall near him and blow him into eternity. On more than one occasion, too, he roamed around the ruins of Ypres; and while he could not be called an imaginative lad he could not help being impressed by the ghastly desolation of this one-time beautiful city. In many of the streets not one stone was left upon another, not one of the inhabitants who had formerly lived there remained; all had fled; it was indeed a city of the dead. To Tom the ruins of the great Cloth Hall and the Cathedral were not the most terrible; what appealed to him most were the empty houses in which things were left by the panic-stricken people. Bedsteads twisted into shapeless masses; clothes half burnt; remnants of pieces of cloth which tradesmen had been in the act of cutting and stitching; children's toys, and thousands of other things which suggested to the boy the life the people had been living. Not a bird sang, not even a street dog roamed amidst the shapeless desolation; the ghastly horror of it all possessed him. Great gaping holes in the old ramparts of the city; trees torn up by their roots and scorched by deadly fire: this was Ypres, not destroyed by the necessities of war, but by pure devilry. At last Tom's turn came to go up to the front trenches. It was with a strange feeling at heart that he, with others, crept along the pave road towards the communication trench. They had to be very careful, because this road was constantly swept by the German machine guns. Presently, when they came to a house used as a first dressing station close to the beginning of the communication trench, Tom felt his heart grow cold. Still, with set teeth, and a hard look in his eyes, he groped his way along the trench, through Piccadilly, and Haymarket, and Bond Street, and Whitehall (for in this manner do the soldiers name the various parts of the zigzag cuttings through the clay): while all the time he could hear the pep, pep, pep, pep of the machine guns, and the shrieking of the shells. There was no romance in war now, it was a grim, ghastly reality. After following the lines of the trenches for well-nigh an hour he was informed that he had now reached the front line and was within a hundred or a hundred and fifty yards of the Huns. For the moment there was a comparative quiet, only occasionally did he hear the sound of a gun, while the shrieking of the shells was less frequent. Danger seemed very far away; he was in a deep hole in the ground, and above the earthworks were great heaps of sand-bags. How could he be hurt? The men whom his company was sent to relieve seemed in high good spirits too, they laughed and talked and bandied jokes. "There seems no danger here," thought Tom. An hour passed and still all was comparatively quiet.