Ypres is impregnated with the memory of the British Army. You will find its cartridges ground into the cobble-stones of the streets, you will find its rations strewn about the floors of the abandoned houses, you will find its billeting directions and inscriptions of all kinds scrawled on doors and walls. As I walked down the echoing streets of ruined houses, amid the ghastly odours of the dead wafted insidiously from choked cellars, with German shrapnel bursting viciously about, sent screaming over from two sides of the salient, I found myself thinking that not the tangible signs of the passage of our army, the abandoned equipment and stores, the simple graves, but the city itself, burned, battered, and blasted, is the most moving monument to the heroic self-sacrifice of our men. Rent and torn and blackened, “all tears, like Niobe weeping for her children,” Ypres, uncaptured still, stands, an indestructible witness to our unbroken line. CHAPTER V BILLETS IN THE FIELD People at home often imagine that our troops _live_ in the trenches. They do not. Generally speaking, they live in billets behind the line, and move into the trenches at regular intervals. They take their turn for duty in the trenches like policemen going on their beat. As a rule the procedure is for them to spend a fixed period in the front-line trenches, another period in reserve (living in billets behind the firing-line, which are occupied in rotation by the troops who, in this particular sector, are out of the trenches), and a further period resting somewhere in the rear. The turn for duty in the trenches is therefore something exceptional, requiring a special effort of endurance, for, if there is any liveliness, or, as we say out here, “frightfulness,” going, there may be no sleep for anybody for several days and nights on end, something demanding special preparations in the way of supplies of cigarettes and other luxuries likely to drop out if there is any difficulty about getting rations up. The greater part of the life of our men at the front is therefore spent in billets in our zone of occupation. Naturally, these billets vary enormously. Roofless houses in ruined villages or dug-outs in the open in a country absolutely devoid of food of any kind are as like as not the sour lot of the troops awaiting their turn of duty in the trenches, though sometimes a village situated at no great distance from the firing-line will provide admirable accommodation for men just out of the firing-line. I dined one June evening with the officers of the famous Princess Patricia’s Light Infantry. I found them waiting their turn for duty in the trenches in a positively palatial mansion, the home of a wealthy French merchant of these parts.