In the course of this visit, I had the good luck to go into the former
German trenches at Notre Dame de Lorette, and also to see some of the
German first-line trenches and dug-outs on the Somme at Fricourt, and
Albert and its hanging statue. But although this was exciting, it was
eclipsed by a visit to Ypres, which I was able to induce my friend, R----,
to manage for me. Ypres just then was not considered a very healthy
spot. I was General Hunter Weston's guest at the Ch?teau de Louvet.
I had once before been in Ypres. It was in the course of a bicycle tour
in 1896 or '97, a fact which afforded me some very poignant points of
comparison. The chief thing that is impressed on my memory was a curious
and pathetic little idyll which is thus recorded in my Diary.
We left our car outside the walls, and entered Ypres close to the Menin
Gate, now demolished--where my wife and I entered the town twenty years
ago.
(We bicycled from Lille, where we had gone to see the Lille bust--a
journey which the whole wealth of the world could not now buy one the
right to take.)
I was glad to find that my memory was not in fault, and I recalled
perfectly the great grey-brick walls and the wide moat which in June,
1896, was covered with white waterlilies.
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