In front of us on the road lay a dreadful barrier, which brought us to a halt.  A German shell had fallen right on top of an ammunition convoy.  Four horses had been blown to pieces and their carcasses lay strewn across the road.  The ammunition wagon had been broken into fragments and smashed and burned to cinders by the explosion of its own shells.  A Belgian soldier lay dead, cut in half by a great fragment of steel.  Further along the road were two other dead horses in pools of blood.  It was a horrible and sickening sight, from which one turned away shuddering with cold sweat, but we had to pass it after some of this dead flesh had been dragged away.

Further down the road we had left two of the cars in charge of Lady Dorothie Feilding and her two nurses.  They were to wait there until we brought back some of the wounded.  Two ambulances came on with our light car, commanded by Lieut.  Broqueville and Dr. Munro.  Mr. Gleeson asked me to help him as stretcher-bearer.  Mr. Ashmead-Bartlett was to work with one of the other stretcher-bearers.

I was in one of the ambulances, and Mr. Gleeson sat behind me in the narrow space between the stretchers.  Over his shoulder he talked in a quiet voice of the job that lay before us.  I was glad of that quiet voice, so placid in its courage.  We went forward at what seemed to me a crawl, though I think it was a fair pace, shells bursting around us now on all sides, while shrapnel bullets sprayed the earth about us.  It appeared to me an odd thing that we were still alive.  Then we came into Dixmude.

When I saw it for the first and last time it was a place of death and horror.  The streets through which we passed were utterly deserted and wrecked from end to end, as though by an earthquake.  Incessant explosions of shell fire crashed down upon the walls which still stood.  Great gashes opened in the walls, which then toppled and fell.  A roof came tumbling down with an appalling clatter.  Like a house of cards blown by a puff of wind, a little shop suddenly collapsed into a mass of ruins.  Here and there, further into the town, we saw living figures.  They ran swiftly for a moment and then disappeared into dark caverns under toppling porticos.  They were Belgian soldiers.

We were now in a side street leading into the Town Hall square.  It seemed impossible to pass, owing to the wreckage strewn across the road.  “Try to take it,” said Dr. Munro, who was sitting beside the chauffeur.  We took it, bumping over heaps of debris, and then swept around into the square.  It was a spacious place, with the Town Hall at one side of it—­or what was left of the Town Hall; there was only the splendid shell of it left, sufficient for us to see the skeleton of a noble building which had once been the pride of Flemish craftsmen.  Even as we turned toward it parts of it were falling upon the ruins already on the ground.  I saw a great pillar lean forward and then topple down.  A mass of masonry crashed from the portico.  Some stiff, dark forms lay among the fallen stones; they were dead soldiers.  I hardly glanced at them, for we were in search of the living.