"37 nouveaux empoisonnés dans la matinée du 23. Impossible de les mener plus loin que l'hôpital civil où ils sont logés dans les caves.... Nous aussi, nous reçûmes notre part: un sur le couvent, et deux, trois, aux alentours. Voilà qui est terrible! L'eau me coula des yeux, mes lèvres bleuirent, j'étais prête à suffoquer." But the brave lady never suggests for a moment that she should leave the place, and did in fact remain in the city until the military insisted on everyone leaving on the 9th of May, when there seems to have been imminent fear of the Germans reaching the city, and when, at any rate, the Kaiser was again waiting at Thielt in expectation of entering it. St. Julien was taken at the time, and the German line advanced to the canal some miles in front of it; but the ruined village was afterwards recaptured and gas drenched by us--a strange Nemesis--in July, 1917, and remained in our hands until the German advance in 1918. Plate 16 certainly does not suggest the tragedy which we must always connect with the name of St. Julien; it is a screen at the entrance to a Chinese camp which stood there in 1919. It illustrates, oddly enough, an ancient Chinese superstition that "spirits"--and of course spirits are always malevolent--can only go straight forward, so that if any kind of screen is placed in front of the house entrance the spirit will be unable to get in, not, apparently, having the sense to go round the barrier. The gentleman standing in front of the screen (which is in effect a huge triptych) gave us to understand that he was the artist, but our knowledge of Chinese and his of English were too limited to be very certain. The screen was certainly quite a satisfactory piece of decoration. In 1917 we were preparing for the long-drawn attack which eventually gave us the Passchendaele Ridge (Plate 17), fighting for months over such ground as the foreground of the photograph shows. Defence by such means as the construction of a "Hindenburg Line" was quite impossible in the mud and slime of the salient, and Von Armin devised the scheme of what we came to call "pillboxes." Each pillbox was a structure (Plate 18) of reinforced concrete, often large enough to hold thirty or forty men with machine-guns, and strong enough to give protection from everything short of a direct hit by a large shell. They were only raised above ground-level sufficiently to allow the guns to be worked, their entrances being, of course, at the back. They were echeloned along behind the front line, and connected and protected by barbed-wire entanglements. They proved a serious difficulty when we first had to deal with them in July-August, 1917. General Haig says: "Many were reduced as our troops advanced, but others held out during the day, and delayed the arrival of our supports."[13] [13] Despatches, p. 118.