All night long we had been
fighting with our backs to our comrades who were in the front trenches. The
enemy had got behind us and we had had to face about in what served for
trenches. By dawn we had him back again in his original position, and we
were facing in the old direction. By dawn we had almost, though not quite,
forced a junction with the British right.
The night of April twenty-second is one that I can never forget. It was
frightful, yes. Yet there was a grandeur in the appalling intensity of
living, in the appalling intensity of death as it surrounded us.
The German shells rose and burst behind us. They made the Yser Canal a
stream of molten glory. Shells fell in the city, and split the darkness of
the heavens in the early night hours. Later the moon rose in a splendor of
spring-time. Straight behind the tower of the great cathedral it rose and
shone down on a bloody earth.
Suddenly the grand old Cloth Hall burst into flames. The spikes of fire
rose and fell and rose again. Showers of sparks went upward. A pall of
smoke would form and cloud the moon, waver, break and pass.
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