+-------------------------------------------------+ |Transcriber’s note: | | | |Obvious typographic errors have been corrected. | | | +-------------------------------------------------+ WOUNDED SOULS PHILIP GIBBS BY PHILIP GIBBS WOUNDED SOULS THE STREET OF ADVENTURE THE INDIVIDUALIST HELEN OF LANCASTER GATE A MASTER OF LIFE THE WAY TO VICTORY. _2 Vols._ THE STRUGGLE IN FLANDERS THE BATTLES OF THE SOMME THE SOUL OF THE WAR ETC., ETC. WOUNDED SOULS BY PHILIP GIBBS AUTHOR OF “THE STREET OF ADVENTURE,” “THE INDIVIDUALIST,” ETC. NEW YORK [Illustration: Logo] GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA CONTENTS BOOK ONE PAGE THE END OF THE ADVENTURE 9 BOOK TWO THROUGH HOSTILE GATES 143 BOOK THREE BUILDERS OF PEACE 241 BOOK ONE: THE END OF THE ADVENTURE WOUNDED SOULS BOOK ONE: THE END OF THE ADVENTURE I It is hard to recapture the spirit of that day we entered Lille. Other things, since, have blurred its fine images. At the time, I tried to put down in words the picture of that scene when, after four years’ slaughter of men, the city, which had seemed a world away, was open to us a few miles beyond the trenchlines, the riven trees, the shell-holes, and the stench of death, and we walked across the canal, over a broken bridge, into that large town where--how wonderful it seemed!--there were roofs on the houses, and glass in the windows and crowds of civilian people waiting for the first glimpse of British khaki. Even now remembrance brings back to me figures that I saw only for a moment or two but remain sharply etched in my mind, and people I met in the streets who told me the story of four years in less than four minutes and enough to let me know their bitterness, hatred, humiliations, terrors, in the time of the German occupation.... I have re-read the words I wrote, hastily, on a truculent typewriter which I cursed for its twisted ribbon, while the vision of the day was in my eyes. They are true to the facts and to what we felt about them. Other men felt that sense of exaltation, a kind of mystical union with the spirit of many people who had been delivered from evil powers. It is of those other men that I am now writing, and especially of one who was my friend--Wickham Brand, with the troubled soul, whom I knew in the years of war and afterwards in the peace which was no peace to him.