One morning early in December I was asked by Dr. Munro to
run down with him in one of our motors to Ypres. A message
had arrived saying that the town had been heavily shelled
during the night, and that there were a number of children and
of wounded there, who ought if possible to be removed to some
less dangerous situation. So we started off to see what we
could do for them. It was a dismal morning, and the rain was
coming down in a steady drizzle which continued all day long,
but fortunately we had a closed car, and we were protected
from the elements. The road to Ypres is a broad avenue between
long lines of tall trees, and to-day it was crowded with soldiers and
transport motors. The French were moving up a large number of
men to relieve and to support their lines between Dixmude and
Ypres. Every little village seemed to be crowded with troops, for
in this weather "the poorest village is better than the best
bivouac," and the contrasts of the uniforms were very striking.
Every type was represented--the smart French officer, the
Zouave, the Turco, and the Arab, and one could not help
wondering what the Senegalese and the Algerians thought
of this soaking rain, or how they would fare in the rigours
of a Belgian winter.
Like so many of the towns of Belgium, Ypres is a town of the
past, and it is only in the light of its history that the meaning of
its wonderful buildings can be realized, or an estimate formed of
the vandalism of its destroyers. Its records date back to the
year 900, and in the twelfth century it was already famous for its
cloth. By the thirteenth century it was the richest and the most
powerful city in Flanders, and four thousand looms gave
occupation to its two hundred thousand inhabitants. These
great commercial cities were also great military organizations,
and there were few wars in the turbulence of the Middle Ages in
which Ypres did not have a share. In fact, it was almost always
engaged in fighting either England, or France, or one of the
other Flemish towns.
After a century of wars, to which Ypres once contributed no
fewer than five thousand troops, the town was besieged by the
English, led by Henry Spencer, Bishop of Norwich, with the help
of the burghers of Ghent and Bruges. The town was surrounded
by earthen ramparts planted with thick hedges of thorn, and by
wide ditches and wooden palisades, and these were held by
some ten thousand men. They were attacked, in 1383, by seventeen
thousand English and twenty thousand Flemish. For two months Ypres
was defended against almost daily attacks in one of the fiercest and
most bloody sieges in history. At last Spencer saw that it was
impossible to take the town by assault, and in view of the advance
of a large French army he withdrew. Ypres was saved, but its
prosperity was gone, for the bulk of its population had fled.
The suburbs, where large numbers of the weavers worked,
had been destroyed by the besiegers and the looms had been
burnt. The tide of trade turned to Bruges and Ghent, though they
did not enjoy for long the prosperity they had stolen.
The commercial madness of the fourteenth century gave way to
the religious madness of the sixteenth. Men's ideas were
changing, and it is a very dangerous thing to change the ideas
of men. For the momentum of the change is out of all proportion
to its importance, and the barriers of human reason may melt
before it. It is a mere matter of historical fact that no oppression
has half the dangers of an obvious reform. At Ypres the
Reformers were first in the field. They had swept through
Flanders, destroying all the beauty and wealth that the piety of
ages had accumulated, and here was rich plunder for these
apostles of the ugly. There is real tragedy in the thought that the
Reformer is sometimes sincere.
But at least the fanatics limited their fury to the symbols of
religion. Philip of Spain could only be sated by flesh and blood,
and for the next fifteen years Ypres was tossed to and fro in an
orgy of persecution and war such as have rarely been waged
even in the name of religion. At the end of that time only a
miserable five thousand inhabitants remained within its broken
ramparts.
With the seventeenth century commerce and religion made way
for politics, and the wars of Louis XIV. fell heavily on Ypres. On
four separate occasions the town was taken by the French, and
the dismantled fortifications which still surround it were once an
example of the genius of Vauban. Yet with all these wars--
commercial, religious, political--with all the violence of its
history, Ypres had kept intact the glorious monuments of the
days of her greatness, and it has been left for the armies of
Culture to destroy that which even the hand of Philip spared.
The centuries have handed down to us few buildings of such
massive grandeur as the great Cloth Hall, a monument of the
days when the Weavers of Ypres treated on equal terms with
the Powers of England and of France. This huge fortress of the
Guilds is about a hundred and fifty yards long. The ground floor
was once an open loggia, but the spaces between its fifty pillars
have been filled in. Above this are two rows of pointed windows,
each exactly above an opening below. In the upper row every
second window has been formed into a niche for the figure of
some celebrity in the history of the town. A delicate turret rises
at each end of the facade, and above it rose the high-pitched
roof which was one of the most beautiful features of the
building. In the centre is the great square tower, reaching to a
height of more than two hundred feet, and ending in an elegant
belfry, which rises between its four graceful turrets. The whole
of this pile was finished in 1304; but in the seventeenth century
there was added at its eastern end the Nieuwerck, an exquisite
Renaissance structure supported entirely on a row of slim
columns, with tiers of narrow oblong windows, and with elaborate
gables of carved stone. The contrast between the strength and
simplicity of the Gothic and the rich decoration of Spain is as
delightful as it is bold. The upper part of this vast building formed
one great hall, covered overhead by the towering roof. The walls
were decorated by painted panels representing the history of
the town, and so large were these that in one bay there was
erected the entire front of an old wooden house which had
been pulled down in the town, gable and all.
And all this is a heap of ruins. Whether any portion of it can
ever be repaired I do not know, but the cost would be fabulous.
The roof is entirely destroyed, and with it the whole of the great
gallery and its paintings, for fire consumed what the shells had
left. Only the bare stone walls remain, and as we stood among
the pillars which had supported the floors above, it was difficult
to realize that the heap of rubbish around us was all that was
left of what had once been the envy of Europe. The only
building which we have at all comparable to the Cloth Hall is the
Palace of Westminster. If it were blasted by shells and gutted
by fire, we might regret it, but what would be our feelings if it
were the legacy of Edward the First, and had been handed
down to us intact through six centuries?
Behind the Cloth Hall stands the Church of St. Martin, once for
two and a half centuries the Cathedral of Ypres. It was largely
built at the same time as the Cloth Hall, and it is a glorious
monument of the architecture of the thirteenth century. Perhaps
its most beautiful features are the great square tower, the lofty
and imposing nave, and the exquisite rose window in the south
wall of the transept, which is said to be the finest in Belgium.
The tower was surrounded with scaffolding, and around its base
were piles of stone, for the church was being repaired when the
war began. I wonder if it will ever be repaired now. The
Germans had expended on its destruction many of their largest
shells, and they had been very successful in their efforts. There
were three huge holes in the roof of the choir where shells had
entered, and in the centre of the transept was a pile of bricks
and stone six feet high. Part of the tower had been shot away,
and its stability was uncertain. The beautiful glass of the rose
window had been utterly destroyed, and part of the tracery was
broken. The old Parish Chapel on the south side of the nave
had nothing left but the altar and four bare walls. The fine old
roof and the great bronze screen which separated it from the
nave had perished in the flames. The screen was lying in small
fragments amongst the rubbish on the chapel floor, and at first I
thought they were bits of rusty iron.
As I stood in the ruins of the Parish Chapel looking round on
this amazing scene, there was a roar overhead, and one of the
big 14-inch shells passed, to explode with a terrific crash
amongst the houses a few hundred yards farther on. It was
plain that the bombardment was beginning again, and that we
must see to our business without any delay. Two more shells
passed overhead as I came out of the church, with a roar very
different from the soft whistle of a small shell. The destruction
produced by one of these large shells is astonishing. One large
house into which a shell had fallen in the previous night had
simply crumpled up. Portions of the walls and a heap of bricks
were all that was left, a bit of an iron bedstead and a fragment
of staircase sticking out from the debris. The roof, the floors,
and the greater part of the walls might never have existed. In
the Place in front of the Cathedral were two holes where shells
had fallen, and either of them would have comfortably held a
motor-car. The children were all together in a little street a
quarter of a mile west of the Cathedral, just where the last three
shells had fallen. Fortunately they had hurt no one, though one
had passed clean through the upper stories of a house where
there were several children being got ready by one of our party
for removal. By good luck through some defect it did not
explode, or the house would have been annihilated and everyone
in it killed. Quite a collection of people had congregated in that
little street, though why they considered it safer than the rest
of the town I do not know. At first they were very unwilling to
let any of the children go at all. But at last about twenty children
were collected and were packed into ambulances. Some of them
were without parents, and were being looked after by the
neighbours, and the parents of some absolutely refused to
leave. More children and a few adults to look after them were
found later, and I think that in the end about a hundred were
taken up to Fumes, to be sent on to Calais as refugees.
The children were as merry as crickets, and regarded it all as a
huge joke; sitting in the ambulances, they looked for all the
world like a school treat. But I have often wondered whether we
were right to take them away or whether it would not have been
better to have left them to take their chance. War is a very
terrible thing, and the well-meant interference of the kind-
hearted may do far more harm than good. What is going to
happen to those children? I suppose that they are in some
refugee home, to remain there till the war is over. And then?
We did our best to identify them, but what are the chances that
many of them will ever see their parents again? From what I
have seen of these things I do not think that they are very large.
Perhaps you will say that the parents ought to have gone with
them. It is easy for the well-to-do to leave their homes and to
settle again elsewhere; but the poorer a man is the less can he
afford to leave what little he possesses. In their own town they
might be in danger, but at least they had not lost their homes,
and they possessed the surroundings without which their
individual lives would be merged in the common ocean of
misery. The problem of the civil population, and especially of
the children, in time of war is entirely beyond the scope of
individual effort. It is a matter with which only a Government or a
very powerful organization can deal, and it is a matter in which
Governments do not take a great deal of interest. Their hands
are quite full enough in trying to defeat the enemy.
In all previous wars between civilized nations a certain regard
has been paid to the safety of the civilian population, and
especially of the women and children. But from the very first the
German policy has been to utterly ignore the rights of non-
combatants, tearing up the conventions which they themselves
had signed for their protection. No Government could be
expected to be prepared for such a total apostasy from the
elementary principles of civilized society, or to anticipate
methods at which a Zulu might blush. If they had done so, it
should have been their first care to remove all non-combatants
from the area of fighting, and to make provision for them
elsewhere. It is unfair that a civilian should be left with the
hopeless choice of leaving a child in a house where it may at
any moment be killed by a shell or taking it away with a
considerable probability that it will be a homeless orphan. For
life is a matter of small moment; it is living that matters.
The problem of the children of Belgium will be one of the most
serious to be faced when the war is over. There will be a great
number of orphans, whilst many more will be simply lost. They
must not be adopted in England, for to them Belgium will look
for her future population. There could be few finer ways in which
we could show our gratitude to the people of Belgium than by
establishing colonies over there where they could be brought
up in their own country, to be its future citizens. It would form a
bond between the two countries such as no treaty could ever
establish, and Belgium would never forget the country which
had been the foster-mother of her children.
But Ypres gave us yet another example of German methods of
war. On the western side of the town, some distance from the
farthest houses, stood the Asylum. It was a fine building
arranged in several wings, and at present it was being used for
the accommodation of a few wounded, mostly women and children,
and several old people of the workhouse infirmary type. It made
a magnificent hospital, and as it was far away from the town and
was not used for any but the purposes of a hospital, we considered
that it was safe enough, and that it would be a pity to disturb the
poor old people collected there. We might have known better.
The very next night the Germans shelled it to pieces, and all
those unfortunate creatures had to be removed in a hurry.
There is a senseless barbarity about such an act which could
only appeal to a Prussian.