You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
‘WIPERS’, Ypres, the Salient. It had to be held. Gaunt, echoing streets, empty but for an occasional soldier, always hurrying. This I was soon to know was a peculiarity of the Salient – no one in sight other than the solitary hurrying figure; uncharacteristic were the standing walls and masonry forming a pattern which made it possible to speak, still, of streets. We were soon done with it and were standing on the banks of the ‘Canal’. Like ‘Wipers’ and ‘Salient’, the word needed no qualification.
These words have little meaning to anyone today, but as an ancient this is the only way of making my voyage through time; from now on it can be only to islands in the mists of memory. Thus, though it must in fact have been dark as we stood there, a few dream figures about to traverse a narrow causeway from one bank to the other, a black puff uncurled in the sky and expanded like the Japanese flowers of my childhood. “A woolly bear; they are quite harmless. If the nose-cap hit you it would kill you, but as you can see, the shell bursts about fifty feet in the air and it would be very unlikely for any of the bits to damage anyone. No, they're quite harmless.”
The Canal was not the place for chat; we moved on impelled partly by doubts of the harmlessness of woolly bears, but also by the state of mind engendered by that dreadful place. Even now the menacing streets of Ypres and this nightmare Canal can return to me and leave a stain of foreboding on the brightest day.
We pushed on in silence till it became too dark to see more than the mud at our feet in the light of gun-flashes. As we were to continue the reconnaissance in daylight the next day, we returned to our waiting lorries. They wasted no time on the journey home, thankful to be getting out.