Mist
at
V ierstraat
152
THE YPRES TIMES
By Donald Boyd.
THE mist which occupied Vierstraat cross-roads, when I woke in the O.P., had
changed the whole place. In the December of 1915 we had come to know the
village as a broken row of houses parallel with the front line, and standing nearly
upon the same level. It looked upon the slope which was crowned by Wytschaete;
that was its value to us; and the roof-line of Vierstraat's houses was high enough to
conceal the path which led to the street. We spent most of the daylight hours on the
first floor of the forge, looking through a window shaped like a segment of orange,
but when the day was quiet we sometimes came down, leaving the slit in the occupation
of a telephonist, and then took the liberty of sitting on the window-sill upon the street,
or walked fifty yards in either direction in the cover of the houses, on the one hand to
the crown of the hill where it dipped towards Ypres, or on the left to the actual cross
roads. Further we could not go because the crossing was under German observation.
But now, in the thick mist, the appearance of the place was changed. The short
view along the street was closed and the neighbouring houses acquired an enlarged
importance, with such alleys and fractures as lay between their walls. Their height
and solidity appeared to be greater at this short range. From the broken roofs the
condensing mist dropped loudly. The obscurity had stopped the war for the time
being. There was no shooting on the front, and the distant traffic of the army, rolling
along the cobble stones by Locre and La Clytte could be heard plainly. I was joined
on the road by the garrison gunner who occupied the next house. We exchanged some
comment upon the kindness of the weather. It had lately snowed and the snow had
been persistent enough to drive through the holes in our houses and cover our blankets,
so that we woke up rather wetter then we had been when we went to bed. Now it
had changed to this mist, which we agreed was a pleasant deviationa holiday in fact.
We both had a complaint to makethat there was an uncomfortable draught through
the slits which our predecessors had made behind the window openings. For in each
O.P. a separate structure stood just behind the windows, for protection, and also so
that the effective opening should be as small as possible. This prevented enemy
observers from seeing movements in the window openings. We also talked about
the strafe," or bombardment, which Vierstraat had suffered the day before.
This decided us to go round to the front of the houses to see how much they had
been damaged on that side. We went to the cross-roads and turned left towards the
front line, which was about three hundred yards ahead. .We could see the road only
for a few yards, perhaps twenty or thirty, but it had all the marks of desertion. A
forlorn look; the grass had sprouted between the setts, and crept forward on the
unpaved margins. The trees were all down and here and there the craters had torn
up the paving and left the stone blocks lying about in disorder. We explored for
a short distance and then turned back for an examination of the gardens of Vierstraat.
The grass was long and hung in plumes upon tfie earth, beaded with mist. Our foot
steps left a black trail behind us. The house fronts reared themselves up suddenly,
crowned with a triangular lattice-work of broken rafters. We stopped by a broken
fruit-tree to study their appearance. It was with some difficulty that we could identify
the ones we used. Indeed we only made sure by going close up to the wall and spying
into the peep-holes in the upper windows. We then found the wound that a 5.9 had
made in the front wall of the Garrison gunner's house. It had struck exactly at the
base of the house and had even blown the wall through to the flooring, whose broken
tiles showed a little in the gap. A smaller shell had hit the top of my wall under the
roof, and had blown half the slates away. There were also a number of fresh shell-
holes in the gardens. We looked at them curiously and poked about among the
