Never shall I forget that summer evening near Brandhoek.  Roake, effervescing as always with droll wit, and Humfrey, with his natural cheerfulness and affability, made me at home in their little hut at once.  I can well recall the scene:  a tiny little wooden hut at the edge of a large field; the wall adorned by a trench map of the Ypres Salient, on which our present position was marked in pencil, and a striking group photo of the Imperial War Cabinet, taken out of an illustrated journal, in which the well-known faces of Lloyd George and Lord Curzon seemed to dominate the picture; a little table upon which Humfrey drafted a signal message to the Adjutant of the 2/5th, announcing my arrival and asking for instructions, the table upon which an excellent little dinner was almost immediately served; outside the observation balloons in a curved line, denoting the Salient, and aircraft sweeping through the skies.

It was then that I first saw what was going to be to me a very common sight during those memorable “Wipers days”—­an air fight.  I had not been in the little wooden hut many minutes before Roake called me out to watch a scrap between British and German aeroplanes over the Salient.  We got out our field-glasses and, in the cool of a summer’s evening, when any ordinary individual in “Blighty” would be relaxing from the labours of the day in cricket or in tennis, we surveyed with interest the contests between the chivalrous heroes of the air far above.  It was then that I first saw a “blazing trail across the evening sky of Flanders.”  There were many such in the summer of 1917, though the brilliant young airman of whose death that glowing eulogy had been written now lay sleeping beneath a little wooden cross in the grave in which the Germans, paying homage to true chivalry, had laid him at Annoeullin.  Who could watch those little specks rising and falling, and falling to rise no more, up there in the bright blue sky without a thrill of admiration for these “New Elizabethans” of England and Germany?

It was during tea that I realized that I was really at the war.  The guns began to boom and the hut shook with the continual vibration.  And then the band of the 2/5th Lancashire Fusiliers struck up some jolly tunes in the field.  War and music going hand in hand, it was difficult to know whether one ought to feel jolly or sad.  I think I may safely say that we felt as jolly and gay as could be; I know that the romantic aspect was the one which appealed to me most.  This was the real thing, none of your home-service games.

The bombardment became more intense as the evening progressed.  After dark the Transport moved off to carry rations up to the men in the line.  If it is not superfluous to do so, I would wish to pay here the warmest possible tribute to those gallant Transport men who used to “carry rations on the road from Pop to Ypres.”  It was no picnic.  The Boche knew quite well the time that vast and apparently never ending chain of traffic would be wending its nightly way from Poperinghe to Ypres.  He shelled the great high road systematically every night.  Every night some of those gallant men would go never to return.  It seemed marvellous that so many could escape the destruction which was hurled at them; but war is full of wonders.