Not far from Dickebusch is the Desolate Chateau.  Before the war it was a handsome place, built by a rich coal-merchant from Lille.  I visited it on a sunny morning.  At the southern gate there was a little black and shapeless heap fluttering a rag in the wind.  I saluted and passed on, sick at heart.  The grounds were pitted with shell-holes:  the cucumber-frames were shattered.  Just behind the chateau was a wee village of dug-outs.  Now they are slowly falling in.  And the chateau itself?

It had been so proud of its finery, its pseudo-Greek columns, and its rich furnishings.  Battered and confused—­there is not a room of it which is not open to the wind from the sea.  The pictures lie prostrate on the floor before their ravisher.  The curtains are torn and faded.  The papers of its master are scattered over the carpet and on the rifled desk.  In the bedroom of its mistress her linen has been thrown about wildly; yet her two silver brushes still lie on the dressing-table.  Even the children’s room had been pillaged, and the books, torn and defaced, lay in a rough heap.

All was still.  At the foot of the garden there was a little village half hidden by trees.  Not a sound came from it.  Away on the ridge miserable Wytschaete stood hard against the sky, a mass of trembling ruins.  Then two soldiers came, and finding a boat rowed noisily round the tiny lake, and the shells murmured harshly as they flew across to Ypres.  Some ruins are dead stones, but the broken houses of Flanders are pitifully alive—­like the wounded men who lie between the trenches and cannot be saved....

Half a mile south from Dickebusch are cross-roads, and the sign-post tells you that the road to the left is the road to Wytschaete—­but Wytschaete faces Kemmel and Messines faces Wulverghem.

I was once walking over the hills above Witzenhausen,—­the cherries by the roadside were wonderful that year,—­and coming into a valley we asked a man how we might best strike a path into the next valley over the shoulder of the hill.  He said he did not know, because he had never been over the hill.  The people of the next valley were strangers to him.  When first I came to a sign-post that told me how to get to a village I could not reach with my life, I thought of those hills above Witzenhausen.  From Wulverghem to Messines is exactly two kilometres.  It is ludicrous.

Again, one afternoon I was riding over the pass between Mont Noir and Mont Vidaigne.  I looked to the east and saw in the distance the smoke of a train, just as from Harrow you might see the Scottish Express on the North-Western main line.  For a moment I did not realise that the train was German, that the purpose of its journey was to kill me and my fellow-men.  But it is too easy to sentimentalise, to labour the stark fact that war is a grotesque, irrational absurdity....

Following the main road south from Dickebusch you cross the frontier and come to Bailleul, a town of which we were heartily sick before the winter was far gone.  In peace it would be once seen and never remembered.  It has no character, though I suppose the “Faucon” is as well known to Englishmen now as any hotel in Europe.  There are better shops in Bethune and better cafes in Poperinghe.  Of the “Allies Tea-Rooms” I have already written.