One day I was searching for a shop where bolts could, once upon a time, be purchased. As I was going down the Rue de Lille, half a dozen shells fell near. One demolished a house but fifty yards ahead. I took shelter in a doorway, and as I did so a Belgian of woebegone appearance, his most characteristic feature a pair of sad, drooping, yellow moustachios, ambled past me down the roadway, pushing a wheelbarrow. On it were three tiny tots, all under four years old. They cuddled together for warmth. One, round-eyed, at the crash of the howitzer shells, was hard at work with a nursing bottle. I warned the Belgian of impending danger, but he stolidly trudged on. Luckily, no more shells came for a time. The Menin Road proper was never healthy. I spent as little time on it as consistent with the proper performance of my work. I never sat for an hour in its vicinity, waiting for the General, that some shell did not fall near it. One afternoon shrapnel fell for an hour near a fork on the Menin Road, which all sensible men gave a wide berth to when convenient. Fifteen minutes after the bombardment died down, a procession filed by the fork, headed for a graveyard in the direction of Hooge. A white-robed boy, with red-tasselled black cap, led the way, bearing a cross. Behind him came a robed priest, then an ancient, dilapidated, one-horse hearse containing a rude, black coffin. A score of mourners, one or two of them men, the rest women and children, dressed in their poor best, brought up the rear. I wondered that they ventured down that shell-swept highway. Yet many such pathetic little processions passed along that road in those days. I saw one _cortège_ wait for a cessation of the shelling, then proceed slowly over the ground that had but a few minutes before been peppered with bits of shell. It was an odd sight. A tiny lad trotted in front under a large wooden cross painted purple. A quartette of little boys behind him bore a rude unpainted sort of stretcher, apparently improvised from the nearest bits of shattered timber to hand. The coffin, resting upon this frame, was covered with a dingy white sheet. A mother, bowed and feeble, followed the coffin. A few youths and a handful of little girls formed the straggling _cortège_, tramping over the snow-covered cobbles, their eyes downcast and red. Death was no stranger in Ypres in those days, but still the Belgians stayed on. The wall of a ruined building, across the road from the Cloth Hall, fell one morning with a loud crash. A column of dust arose. That many were not injured was surprising. One woman was killed and a couple of passing French soldiers hurt, but post-card vendors were exhibiting their wares under an adjacent wall, equally dangerous, an hour later.