SILENT YPRES
“Et erit sui monumentum gloriosum.”
(Epitaph in the ruined Cathedral of
St. Martin at Ypres.)
In years to come the name of Ypres will loom large in the annals of our
race. Before the war it was known only to a few tourists who, sated
with the more familiar art treasures of Belgium, had the curiosity or
the time to take the steam tram out from Ostend or Menin to the quaint
old city lying in the plain thrust up close to the French frontier.
Such visitors had their pains well rewarded (and a two-hour journey
by a Belgian steam tram along the flat and dusty Flemish roads merits
some recompense). In Ypres they found a perfect jewel of an old-world
Flemish city, small and self-contained, well preserved, the two or
three principal streets lined with fine old houses with curiously
wrought façades, leading to the splendid square, the _Grand’ Place_,
or _Groote Markt_, as the bilingual street signs proclaimed, where the
magnificent Hall of the Cloth-Makers, the far-famed _Halle des Draps_,
with its noble tower and majestic front, quite dwarfed the charming
Renaissance houses nestling about the square. From the distant plain
the lofty towers of Ypres peeped forth in the summer sunshine above
a fringe of greenery. The trees marked the old ramparts of the city,
where the burgesses were wont to take the air in the evenings, and
where the hearts and intertwined initials cut into the stout old trees
still speak, amid the desolation of to-day, of love-making through the
centuries.
All the stirring past of Ypres, once wealthiest and most powerful city
of Flanders, was outlined in the noble buildings thrusting their heads
up out of the undulating plain. Built in a sparsely populated region,
there was no city, far and wide, to compare with the beauty, the
luxury, and wealth of Ypres. It stood proudly alone, superbly beautiful
among ugly surroundings, its ramparts all about, a broad moat where
swans glided idly among the water-lilies on the one side, the Yser
Canal, bearing trade to Ostend on its sluggish waters, on the other.
Ypres feared no comparison with the cities far about. Neither Courtrai
nor Menin nor Lille nor Béthune nor St. Omer, nor even Arras, could
match with this perfect jewel of old Flemish civilization.
Square and solid to the four winds of heaven, which in winter blow
lustily across these mournful plains, stood the Gothic tower of
the Cathedral of St. Martin, where Bishop Jansen, most renowned of
heretics, sleeps his untroubled sleep in the shadow of the high-altar.
Near by rose the massive red-brick keep of the Abbey of Thérouanne,
last survival of a powerful and wealthy foundation transferred to Ypres
when Elizabeth ruled in England. The lofty Renaissance roof of St.
Nicholas, the graceful spire of St. Pierre, the high fabric of St.
Jacques, looked down from other parts of the city on the ancient gabled
houses clinging close together in the narrow cobbled streets. The
splendid old houses of the Ypres guilds, rich and independent and free,
told of the days when the cloth-makers and lace-workers of Ypres were
renowned throughout Europe, before pestilence and internal dissension
and wars dethroned the city from its high estate.
There was a delightful intimacy in this old-world Flemish city. Even
in the names of the streets you saw it--the Street of Paradise, a
narrow thread of an opening between two ancient gabled houses with a
glimpse of waving foliage at the end; the Street of the Pots, where
doubtless the tinsmiths once sat and hammered before their shop-doors;
the Street of the Mice, survival of some legend of the Middle Ages; the
Street of the Moon, derived probably from a shop or inn sign. A fine
old almshouse, with gaudily painted statues in niches on the outside,
the _Hospice Belle_, a refuge for old women founded in the days of the
Plantagenets by a pious noblewoman of Ypres, Christine de Guines, stood
in the Rue de Lille, a perfect background to a Jan Steen or Pieter
Brueghel painting. In every street the elaborately decorated fronts and
carved doors were silent witness of centuries of prosperity and ease,
the fatal fat years that brought ruin to Belgium.
But above all and before all, first and foremost, pride and heart
of the city as it was its centre, rose the fair square tower of the
Cloth Hall, with its four richly decorated pinnacles in the Gothic
style and great golden clock. The heavy hand of the nineteenth-century
restorer, taking his cue from the smug iconoclasts of Victoria and
Louis Philippe, had played havoc with the interior rooms, great, lofty
halls with fine old wooden roofing. The walls had been decorated with
frescoes in the best “Sham Castle” style, illustrating the history
of the city. But nothing, not even the modern statues set in niches
to replace the statues destroyed by the armies of the _Directoire_,
could spoil the majestic harmony, the perfection of line, of the great
three-storied façade with its corner-turrets, a vast towering front
such as you might have seen nowhere else in the world.
The years that have gone “with the old world to the grave,” as Henley
sang, swept all the horrors of warfare over Ypres, yet the city
survived. Often in bygone days the sky above Ypres had reddened with
the flames of the buildings set alight by the conqueror, while the
narrow streets ran with the blood of the hapless inhabitants massacred
by a ruthless victor. Popular riots, fighting between the nobles and
the Guilds, an awful visitation of the Black Death--the same plague
that ravaged England in the fourteenth century and affected our entire
national life as deeply as Magna Carta itself--and a succession of
sieges, destroyed the one-time commercial supremacy of Ypres. Over
against the Lille Gate of the city there still stands, amid the rack
and ruin of to-day, a humble little house with a gabled front of
timber, probably the most ancient building in the city, that has
witnessed most of the exciting happenings of Ypres’ storied past:
the burning of the outlying parts of the town by the English and the
burghers of Ghent in 1383; the devastations of the Iconoclasts, most
fantastic of sects, in 1566; the sack of the city by the Gueux in 1578;
its capture by the soldiers of Alexander Farnese in 1584; and by the
French, who obtained possession of Ypres four times in the seventeenth
century and held it until 1715.
Harried by fire and sword, the Ypres weavers fled from their homes, and
many came to England, where the so-called Wipers Tower at Rye is, I
believe, a token of the hospitality they received in our islands. Now
once again, after many centuries, the hand of fate has bound together
the threads of England and the ancient Flemish town so close that, as
long as England endures, the name of Ypres shall signify a stern ordeal
bravely borne and willing faithfulness even unto death.
The graves of our dead, the heroes of the two great battles which raged
about this placid city, the dead of the fierce assaults, the daily
toll of the trenches, lie in a vast semicircle about Ypres. Ypres was
already a sacred name to us, while its towers and pinnacles yet stood,
and life pulsated as of old in the congested streets of the quaint old
town. Now, in its ruins heaped up in a funeral pyre over the corpses of
its hapless civilians slain by German monster shells, it is, more than
ever, a fane for ever holy to Englishmen, who in days to come shall
know no greater pride than to say, “I was at Ypres!”
It was in the chill wet days of October that our army first came to
Ypres. We had fought the great battles of the Marne and the Aisne, and
Sir John French had executed that wonderfully adroit and silent move
from the Aisne to the left of the Allied line to hold the Germans off
the Channel ports. The Seventh Division, fresh from its ineffectual
attempt to save Antwerp--ineffectual because too late--had been placed
under Sir John French’s orders and was operating eastward of Ypres. Sir
Douglas Haig, beloved of Corps Commanders, Sir John French’s trusted
Chief of Staff in South Africa, was sent to take his First Army Corps
through Ypres towards Thourout, with the idea of sweeping the Germans
eastward with the help of the French.
Ypres, with its snug houses and intimate streets, must have made a
comforting impression on our troops, the war-worn veterans of Mons,
the Marne, and the Aisne, as they tramped in from beneath the sighing
poplars of the Poperinghe road. The city yet sheltered people when our
troops came through; moreover, the 87th French Territorial Division
was billeted in the town. How many of the Englishmen, whose eyes were
gladdened by the sight of the old-world houses and smiling prosperity
of the ancient city, were destined never to return through the Menin
Gate, beyond which in the wooded plain the greatest battle of the war
was raging! In the churches and convents of the city, particularly in
the Chapel of the Irish Ladies of Ypres, where was hanging the British
standard captured by Clare’s Dragoons fighting with the French at
Ramillies, many a prayer went up in those days for the army fighting
so steadfastly without the city against overwhelming odds.
The roads from Ypres radiate like spokes of a wheel. To pass from
westward to eastward of Ypres you must go through the city. During the
fight all the immense activity of the rear of an army, redoubled in
intensity when a battle is in progress, went on in and about Ypres,
whose century-old houses, with their red roofs and overhanging gables,
will be ever associated with the battle in the minds of those who
fought there. For three weeks, while our thin line resisted the mighty
smashes of the flower of the German army, the guns drummed almost
unceasingly in the distance, and the little motor ambulances came
whirring over the uneven cobble-stones of the city, bearing in the
wounded to the field dressing-station, an unending procession of pain.
Ypres could not remain unscathed in the battle. Soon the German
batteries took the proud towers of the Cloth Hall and St. Martin’s
for their goal, and amid a rain of shells pouring into the city, the
luckless inhabitants, once again after centuries, were compelled to fly
for safety out along the bare and dusty road that leads to Poperinghe.
The Poperinghe road! Who of our army in the field that has ever passed
along it will ever forget that hideous highway--the road of pain for
many, the road of death for many, the road of glory for all? I have
traversed it in all weathers and in all conditions, and never have I
seen it without a feeling almost of dread, the sensation of treading on
ground sanctified by the feet of heroes going to their death.
Straight and ugly and flat, lined with tall poplars with bushy tops,
set in the centre with uneven _pavé_ worn bright by the wheels of a
thousand motor-cars and lorries and carts, the Poperinghe road has been
the silent witness of all the vicissitudes of the stupendous struggles
which have raged about Ypres. On its polished _pavé_ the emotions of
a million men have been ground fine by the relentless wheels of the
chariot of war. Men have passed along that road into battle, their
hearts singing with the thrill of great deeds standing before, and
along it have returned from the front pale, silent forms, the Angel of
Death their escort--or have returned no more.
I have met them going into action along that road, in the blazing heat
of noonday, tramping steadily in the thick dust of the footpath lining
the _pavé_, tunics unbuttoned, sweat streaming down their begrimed
faces. I have seen them returning, lying very still in the motor
ambulances, with the stolid philosophy of wounded men, or else stifling
in the ghastly grip of the asphyxiating gas.
Not even 17-inch shells blindly dropped at arbitrary intervals will
permanently separate the Fleming from his home. Therefore, as soon as
the German bombardment of Ypres slackened, the refugees came streaming
back to find a great slice cut out of the tower of the Cloth Hall, the
tower and roof of St. Martin’s irreparably damaged, and many houses in
different quarters of the town considerably battered.
When I paid my first visit to Ypres in March--it was, I remember,
during the battle of Neuve Chapelle which was raging far to the
south--the city was full of life. British, French, and Belgian troops
were billeted there. There was a fine medley of khaki, _bleu horizon_,
as the new powder-blue of the French Army is called, and the variegated
hues of the uniforms of the _braves Belges_. The soldiers had
fraternized with one another and with the populace. All the small boys
were wearing puttees, all the small girls, and some of the grown-up
ones, British Army badges, whilst there appeared to reign a fine spirit
of Socialism with regard to the rations of the three armies. Everybody,
soldiers and civilians alike, seemed to be subsisting on bully-beef,
_singe_ (as the French soldier calls his tinned meat), the famous
plum-and-apple jam of the British Expeditionary Force, and ration
biscuits. English cigarettes and newspapers were for sale in the shops,
and here and there on shutters or on doors were inscribed in more or
less idiomatic English notices to the effect that washing was done, or
that eggs and milk were for sale.
Whether it was the premonition that I should never see Ypres again as a
populated city, I know not, but the fact remains that every detail of
that brief visit to the city in March remains engraved on my memory.
The streets were swarming with soldiers and children. Huge lorries of
our Mechanical Transport grunted through the streets; mounted police
clop-clopped over the cobbles; the women, lineal descendants of the
lace-workers of the Middle Ages, sat at their half-doors, and plied
the funny little wooden cocoons by means of which the renowned Ypres
lace is made. Only the _Grand’ Place_, with the torn tower and gaping
roof of the Cloth Hall, and the battered belfry of St. Martin’s, the
damaged Lunatic Asylum where a Red Cross hospital was installed, and
here and there a roofless house or a shell-hole torn in a façade,
remained to tell of the stern struggle which had raged about the city.
I roamed through the empty and battered rooms of the Cloth Hall, and
picked up from the floor great flakes of the ugly frescoes which had
decorated the walls. I had a perfectly prosaic tea in a little teashop
on the _Grand’ Place_ before motoring away through the crowded streets
into the gathering darkness. Thus I left Ypres, peaceful and busy, and,
to tell the truth, I think, rather basking in the sunshine of publicity
brought to the old place after so many centuries by the historic events
of which it was the centre. Two months were to elapse before I saw
Ypres again. Then Ypres was dead.
In the smiling country of the Mendips, in Somersetshire, there stands
a little village church alone by itself in the fields, remote from
the village to which it has given its name. In my schoolboy days in
Somersetshire they used to tell me that that church--the name of
which has gone from me--was the last survival of one of the villages
devastated by the Black Death when it ravaged England in the fourteenth
century.
They said, I remember, that the villagers could not plough the fields
about the ancient church, for the stones and bricks of the vanished
hamlet were still lying just beneath the surface. In later years men
had built another village to take the place of that which was dead,
but had placed it away from the original site, so that only the little
church remained amid the fallow fields to speak to future generations
of a little corner of England razed from the face of the earth.
The picture of that little Somersetshire church came drifting back
to me over a long span of years when I went back to Ypres on a sunny
morning in May, a week or so after the second great attempt of the
Germans, reinforced by asphyxiating gas, to burst their way through to
the sea had failed. “_Lucia e morte, la bella Lucia!_” runs the old
Italian song. Ypres, beautiful Ypres, was dead, and Death had strewn
all the approaches to the city with the hideous emblems of his trade.
From April 24 to May 13 a second great struggle had raged about Ypres,
where our line bent out in a wide salient round the city. Ypres was
shelled incessantly throughout the battle with artillery of the
heaviest calibre, and our reinforcements, rushed up from other parts
of the line, met on their way into Ypres the long and melancholy
procession of refugees again seeking safety in flight, while the huge
German “fat Berthas,” as the Boches call their 17-inch shells, exploded
noisily in the emptying city.
I remember arriving in Lisbon at three o’clock on a bright moonlit
October night on the day following the revolution. The Sud-Express,
which brought me down from Paris, was the first train into the
Portuguese capital since the overthrow of the Monarchy. The Central
Station was battered by artillery fire, the houses in the Avenida
da Liberdade were torn and pitted with shell-holes, and the city
lay absolutely silent and deserted, the ruins hard and black in
the brilliant white moonlight. Lisbon on that October night is the
only city I have seen that even approximately resembled Ypres as
I found it on that sunny May morning. Even so the resemblance was
fallacious, for the battered corner of Lisbon which met my eyes on my
arrival represented practically the whole of the damage done, and the
prevailing silence was the silence of night, whereas Ypres was all
destroyed, and the silence was the silence of death.
Neither St. Pierre, Martinique, nor Messina, nor Kingston, Jamaica--as
I have it on the authority of men who visited those places after their
destruction by earthquake, and who have also seen Ypres--produced on
the mind such an overwhelming impression as the spectacle of this
fair city of Flanders smitten with death all standing as it were.
An earthquake or a cyclone will all but obliterate a city, will
sweep across it, and leave a vast jumble of ruins in its passage.
Bombardment, on the other hand, even the heaviest, will seldom wipe out
the line of the streets, and the capricious path of the shells will
leave standing single relics that recall in a flash all the beauty, all
the intimacy, of the city that has passed away.
The great battle that had raged for three weeks about Ypres had spread
on all sides the disorder of war. The warm air was heavy with the
stench of dead horses putrefying in the sun, their torn carcasses
lying athwart the roads or sprawling in the fields where German shells
had rent great holes in the grass or brown earth. The little houses
by the roadside--squalid hovels of staring red brick, for the most
part--bore abundant traces of the passage of our soldiers to and from
the fight. Here a broken rifle lay resting against the post of a door
hanging lamentably on a single hinge and giving a glimpse of wild
confusion within--furniture overturned, crockery broken, mattresses
disembowelled, with the sunshine streaming in through a shell-hole in
the roof. There lay a crumpled khaki overcoat beside a tangled heap of
webbing equipment, with empty cartridge-cases scattered around. Heaps
of empty shell-cases, ranging from the huge cylinder of the 4·7 gun
to the natty little tube of the light field-gun, were piled up in the
farmyards where deep wheel-ruts, empty fuse-boxes, and all the litter
of batteries, showed where the gun emplacements had been. Here and
there I caught sight of a cheerful English face in the little roadside
houses. Some of our men were billeted there. Some of the faces were
lathered, and a great sound of splashing and a strong odour of fried
bacon announced that the breakfast-hour was at hand.
A lonely sentry standing against the wall of a shattered _estaminet_,
a dead horse lying in a pool of blood in a gutter, a long vista of
empty streets lined with roofless houses, jagged beams projecting into
the void, jets of bricks spouted out across the cobble-stones amid
charred fragments of furniture, and a silence so absolute, so heavy,
that one might almost hear it--this was what the Hun had left of Ypres.
Here, indeed, was the tragedy of Belgium, the horror of Louvain, the
crime of Dinant. But murdered Ypres, as it seemed to me, cried out
more loudly to Heaven for vengeance than her slaughtered sisters. Her
destruction had been wrought from afar, the destroyer could not enter,
her citizens had left her, her saviour shunned her. The city was empty,
desolate, her toppling walls bending forward as though in grief for her
children buried beneath the ruins, for the utter obliteration of five
centuries of work and planning to the end of prosperity, happiness, and
beauty.
The city lay silent in the sunshine, and a subtle odour of death
crept out of nooks and crannies, where swarms of noisome flies danced
eternally in the sunbeams. But the air above me was full of noise. Our
heavy shells were passing over and about the city with a prodigious
reverberating bang that seemed to shake the vault of heaven, followed
by long-drawn-out gurgling rushes like the beating of wings of a host
of lost angels. Now and then the scream of shells became louder on a
different note. Then the sound stopped of a sudden, and was swallowed
up in a deafening explosion mingling with an orange flash and a pillar
of black or white smoke. Not even dead might Ypres find mercy at the
hands of her tormentors. Morning and evening the Germans shelled the
empty shell of a city, demolishing the ruins, rekindling fires that had
burnt themselves out.
I paid many visits to Ypres. The dead city fascinated me. Every visit
was for me a pious pilgrimage to the place of sacrifice of the best of
England’s sons. The crumbling, battered remnant of the Cloth Hall, the
roofless nave of St. Martin’s, the ruined houses of the Guilds, the
four-square tower of the Abbey of Thérouanne, sliced and rent but not
demolished--all those relics of a beauty that was Flemish were to me
Belgium’s offering to the memories of the men who had laid down their
lives that a great crime might be atoned. Some day, maybe, we shall
know how many shells the Germans hurled into Ypres. I know that in all
my visits to the ruined city I never found a single house that had
escaped unscathed, and I passed through every quarter of the town.
The atmosphere of Ypres was heavy with tragedy. Alone and unheeded
I wandered from house to house--ever obsessed with the feeling that
I was indecently intruding into another’s intimacy--amid the rich
_intérieurs_ of the old patrician families and the humble surroundings
of the small shopkeepers. I rambled through the ancient cloisters of
the Belle Hospice, where the exquisite Renaissance chapel had been
destroyed save for a single delicate pillar still rearing its head
aloft to where God’s blue heaven now formed the roof. I roamed through
Ypres’ ruined churches, where the pigeons were fluttering to and fro
over heaps of rubbish that on examination disintegrated themselves into
fragments of old pictures, pieces of carved oak confessionals, remnants
of _prie-dieu_, all dusted with the fine yellow powder scattered by the
German high-explosive shells.
The sacristy of St. Martin’s, where the exquisitely embroidered sacred
vestments still peeped out of their long, flat drawers, was ankle-deep
in this dust. It lay over everything--on the linen sheets enveloping
the magnificent copes on their wooden stands, on the Mass missals and
vessels, on the old brass candelabra, even on the uniform of the Suisse
cast hurriedly in a corner. One day I met an _abbé_ who was seeking to
salve what he could of the church treasures. With him was a Carmelite
monk. The wizened old _abbé_ and the tonsured monk in his brown and
white habit dragging old pictures across the ruined square formed a
picture that might have come straight out of the Middle Ages.
The fancy took me to see what the bombardment had left of the two
museums of Ypres, containing valuable collections of old Flemish
pottery and china and prints of the city. The Municipal Museum had been
installed in the so-called _Boucheries_, a fine old colonnaded house
opposite the Cloth Hall. The other had been housed in an old-world
mansion, the Hotel Merghelynck, in the street that the French call the
Rue de Lille and the Flemish the Rijssel-Straat, Rijssel being the
Flemish name for Lille. Both museums were utterly destroyed. Whether
the City Fathers of Ypres had removed the treasures of Ypres to a place
of safety before the first bombardment I do not know, but of both
museums only the blackened shell remained, the interior piled up high
with an immense heap of bricks and charred rafters.
“_Est-ce que mon lieutenant voudrait boire un coup?_” a sour-visaged
Belgian peasant asked me in Ypres one morning. The Germans were
shelling the city heavily, and I was inquiring as to the danger
spots. The peasant was loading a cart with furniture from a big house
in the Rue d’Elverdinghe (one of the principal streets), with the
assistance of a mate and under the indulgent eye of a Belgian gendarme.
These three men, with my companion and myself, were, I believe, the
only human beings in Ypres that day. Standing drinks to strangers
is inexpensive in a deserted city where locks no longer serve to
imprison bottles in their cellars, and anyway looting is discouraged
in the British Army. So, to the speechless amazement of the Belgians,
who pointed, with gestures significant of the delights awaiting us,
to a large array of ancient, cobwebbed bottles set out on a buhl
table, we refused to drink with them. But we went over the house, a
treasure-house of old Flemish art, as fine a specimen of a patrician
home of the Low Countries as one might wish to see.
The peasants were salving the treasures for the owner, who had fled
for refuge to the village of Watou, some twenty miles away. Everything
within was in the wildest disorder, and the peasants, with none too
tender hand, were piling pell-mell into baskets and crates exquisite
specimens of old Flemish pottery, tiles, blown-glass flagons, and
wood-carving. I noticed on the floor a lovely old stone drinking-jug
inscribed “Iper, 1506”--the sort of jug you see in a Teniers or
Jan Steen painting. This family seemed to have thrown nothing away
all through the centuries it had lived in the house. In one room a
wonderful collection of old children’s toys was scattered about the
floor--punchinellos and jack-in-the boxes, with clothes of faded
chintz, and little model rooms, complete to the little clock on the
wall, enclosed in boxes with glass sides. A shell had come through
the roof of the library, a bright and sunny apartment on the top
floor, with a charming outlook on the green surroundings of Ypres,
and sent the bookshelves and their contents flying before it went on
its way through another room on the floor below and out of the house.
Old calf-bound tomes were scattered about the place in a smother of
brick-dust.
Disaster sometimes overtook the salvage parties. Whilst dodging shells
in Ypres one late afternoon, about the hour of the “evening hate,” as
our army calls the German evening bombardment, I came upon a large
blackened patch opposite the Cloth Hall. As it had not been there on
my last visit, I examined it. I did not have to look very closely. The
sickening stench of charred human flesh took me by the throat as I
approached the patch. A scorched black bowler hat and some fragments of
burnt cloth were, with that vapour of the charnel-house, all that were
left to show that the remains of a man lay in that horrible heap. There
were two charred skulls of horses, some blackened harness chains and
calcined parts of a cart. Near by was a jagged lump of cast-iron shell,
which lies by me as I write. The cart and horses of one of the salvage
parties had obviously been overwhelmed by a shell which, after blowing
up driver, horses, and cart, had started a fire which had utterly
consumed what the explosion had left.
In past centuries Ypres has been Flemish, French, and Belgian in turn.
Whatever her ultimate fate, whether the city be built up again on her
ruins or suffered to remain as she is, a perpetual monument of Hunnish
malice, henceforth and for all time Ypres will be as British as the
impress of the place left on a hundred thousand brains can make it.
Wherever I have been all along our winding line I have been plied with
questions about Ypres. “We were there in October.” “I was dressed in
the asylum there when I got pipped on the Zillebeke ridge.” “What about
the Cloth Hall?” “Are the cavalry barracks destroyed?”
The British graves in Ypres--but a fraction of the endless graveyards
which the defence of the city has filled in the plain and on the wooded
slopes beyond the gates--are a further link between Ypres and the
Empire. There is a cluster of wooden crosses in the fields over against
the asylum, where I have seen orderlies digging fresh graves when I
have passed that way. There are graves on the ramparts, old graves
hastily dug in the leaf-mould by the shallow trenches thrown up by the
French round the city in October, and new graves, the resting-place of
men killed in and about the city when the trees were green with this
year’s summer foliage.
Ypres is impregnated with the memory of the British Army. You will
find its cartridges ground into the cobble-stones of the streets, you
will find its rations strewn about the floors of the abandoned houses,
you will find its billeting directions and inscriptions of all kinds
scrawled on doors and walls. As I walked down the echoing streets of
ruined houses, amid the ghastly odours of the dead wafted insidiously
from choked cellars, with German shrapnel bursting viciously about,
sent screaming over from two sides of the salient, I found myself
thinking that not the tangible signs of the passage of our army, the
abandoned equipment and stores, the simple graves, but the city
itself, burned, battered, and blasted, is the most moving monument to
the heroic self-sacrifice of our men. Rent and torn and blackened, “all
tears, like Niobe weeping for her children,” Ypres, uncaptured still,
stands, an indestructible witness to our unbroken line.