Dead horses in dozens along the way lay close to the wheel track. We passed an ambulance, its front portion torn away by a shell, and then the remnants of a supply wagon, smashed to matchwood. As we sped on, as fast as the continual obstructions and deep shell-holes would allow, shells fell behind us, screeching overhead every few seconds with strange, weird, discordant notes, culminating in a reverberating bang! that seemed thrown back at us by the high walls across the moat. The dozens of dead horses became scores as we pushed on. Some fields by the road were literally covered with them. A signals corps man told me that at one point his orders for dark night journeys across those fields were as follows: "Go down the hedge till you reach the ditch, turn right, and go toward the big pile of dead horses until you come to the gap in the next hedge." Those instructions could be easily followed on the blackest night, if one's olfactory nerves were in working order. Every breath of air seemed to our unaccustomed nostrils to be charged with noisome smells. As we approached Potijze the infantry fire grew less in volume. The Hun onslaught, the first of five distinct attacks to be pushed home by the Germans that day, had failed, and the breathing space was the more heavily punctuated by the howitzer shells for half an hour, as if in a special spleen of disappointment. Most of the British guns had been withdrawn from the Salient and to the west of the canal. Two batteries of 18-pounders left near Potijze were firing with the valour of one hundred as we came up. But field-guns of light calibre, firing shrapnel, have less voice in an argument than the heavy howitzers with their 6-inch, 8-inch, or 14-inch high explosive shells. The Huns' howitzers on that Ypres front must have outnumbered our heavy ordnance by at least twenty to one that Sunday morning. Long straggling strings of wounded soldiers trickled past on the Potijze road, making their way painfully around Ypres to the north-west, for to linger long on the Menin road, over which we had come, was to court sure death. General de Lisle stopped the car not far from the Potijze château, and he and Hardress Lloyd walked through a field to the dug-out in which General Mullens had established 2nd Cavalry Brigade Headquarters. I turned the car and backed it between two walls of what once were dwelling-houses. Sitting close to the bottom of the wall, beside the car, I counted shell intervals while waiting. From two to three shells burst near the Potijze cross-roads every minute, but by far the greater number of Hun projectiles went on, over my head, to the Menin bridge and Ypres. A good-sized bough from a tree above dropped on my head, and a piece of shell casing, quite hot, struck my foot as it fell, spent, beside me.