When we drew near Ypres we met a civilian wagon laden with
furniture of a lower middle-class house, and also with lengths of gilt
picture frame-moulding. There was quite a lot of gilt in the wagon. A
strong, warm wind was blowing, and the dust on the road and from
the railway track was very unpleasant. The noise of artillery
persisted. As a fact, the wagon was hurrying away with furniture and
picture-frame mouldings under fire. Several times we were told not
to linger here and not to linger there, and the automobiles, emptied
of us, received very precise instructions where to hide during our
absence. We saw a place where a shell had dropped on to waste
ground at one side of the road, and thrown up a mass of earth and
stones on to the roof of an asylum on the other side of the road. The
building was unharmed; the well-paved surface of the road was
perfect--it had received no hurt; but on the roof lay the earth and
stones. Still, we had almost no feeling of danger. The chances were
a thousand to one that the picture-frame maker would get safely
away with his goods; and he did. But it seemed odd--to an absurdly
sensitive, non-Teutonic mind it seemed somehow to lack justice--
that the picture-framer, after having been ruined, must risk his life in
order to snatch from the catastrophe the debris of his career.
Further on, within the city itself, but near the edge of it, two men
were removing uninjured planks from the upper floor of a house; the
planks were all there was in the house to salve. I saw no other
attempt to make the best of a bad job, and, after I had inspected the
bad job, these two attempts appeared heroic to the point of mere
folly.
I had not been in Ypres for nearly twenty years, and when I was last
there the work of restoring the historic buildings of the city was not
started. (These restorations, especially to the Cloth Hall and the
Cathedral of St. Martin, were just about finished in time for the
opening of hostilities, and they give yet another proof of the German
contention that Belgium, in conspiracy with Britain, had deliberately
prepared for the war--and, indeed, wanted it!) the Grande Place was
quite recognisable. It is among the largest public squares in Europe,
and one of the very few into which you could put a medium-sized
Atlantic liner. There is no square in London or (I think) New York into
which you could put a 10,000-ton boat. A 15,000-ton affair, such as
even the Arabic, could be arranged diagonally in the Grande Place
at Ypres.
This Grande Place has seen history. In the middle of the thirteenth
century, whence its chief edifices date, it was the centre of one of
the largest and busiest towns in Europe, and a population of
200,000 weavers was apt to be uproarious in it. Within three
centuries a lack of comprehension of home politics and the simple
brigandage of foreign politics had reduced Ypres to a population of
5,000. In the seventeenth century Ypres fell four times. At the
beginning of the nineteenth century it ceased to be a bishopric. In
the middle of the nineteenth century it ceased to be fortified; and in
the second decade of the twentieth century it ceased to be
inhabited. Possessing 200,000 inhabitants in the thirteenth century,
5,000 inhabitants in the sixteenth century, 17400 inhabitants at the
end of the nineteenth century, it now possesses 0 inhabitants. It is
uninhabited. It cannot be inhabited. Scarcely two months before I
saw it, the city--I was told--had been full of life; in the long period
of calm which followed the bombardment of the railway-station
quarter in November 1914 the inhabitants had taken courage, and
many of those who had fled from the first shells had sidled back
again with the most absurd hope in their hearts. As late as the third
week in April the Grande Place was the regular scene of commerce,
and on market-days it was dotted with stalls upon which were offered
for sale such frivolous things as postcards displaying the damage
done to the railway-station quarter.
Then came the major bombardment, which is not yet over.
You may obtain a just idea of the effects of the major bombardment
by adventuring into the interior of the Cathedral of St. Martin. This
Cathedral is chiefly thirteenth-century work. Its tower, like that of the
Cathedral at Malines, had never been completed--nor will it ever be,
now--but it is still, with the exception of the tower of the Cloth Hall,
the highest thing in Ypres. The tower is a skeleton. As for the rest of
the building, it may be said that some of the walls alone substantially
remain. The choir--the earliest part of the Cathedral--is entirely
unroofed, and its south wall has vanished. The apse has been
blown clean out. The Early Gothic nave is partly unroofed. The
transepts are unroofed, and of the glass of the memorable rose
window of the south transept not a trace is left--so far as I can
remember.
In the centre of the Cathedral, where the transepts meet, is a vast
heap of bricks, stone, and powdery dirt. This heap rises irregularly
like a range of hills towards the choir; it overspreads most of the
immense interior, occupying an area of, perhaps, from 15,000 to
20,000 square feet. In the choir it rises to a height of six or seven
yards. You climb perilously over it as you might cross the Alps. This
incredible amorphous mass, made up of millions of defaced
architectural fragments of all kinds, is the shattered body of about
half the Cathedral. I suppose that the lovely carved choir-stalls are
imbedded somewhere within it. The grave of Jansen is certainly at
the bottom of it. The aspect of the scene, with the sky above, the
jagged walls, the interrupted arches, and the dusty piled mess all
around, is intolerably desolate. And it is made the more so by the
bright colours of the great altar, two-thirds of which is standing, and
the still brighter colours of the organ, which still clings, apparently
whole, to the north wall of the choir. In the sacristy are collected gilt
candelabra and other altar-furniture, turned yellow by the fumes of
picric acid. At a little distance the Cathedral, ruin though it is, seems
solid enough; but when you are in it the fear is upon you that the
inconstant and fragile remains of it may collapse about you in a gust
of wind a little rougher than usual.
You leave the outraged fane with relief. And when you get outside
you have an excellent opportunity of estimating the mechanism
which brought about this admirable triumph of destruction; for there
is a hole made by a 17-inch shell; it is at a moderate estimate fifty
feet across, and it has happened to tumble into a graveyard, so that
the hole is littered with the white bones of earlier Christians.
The Cloth Hall was a more wonderful thing than the Cathedral of St.
Martin, which, after all, was no better than dozens of other
cathedrals. There was only one Cloth Hall of the rank of this one. It
is not easy to say whether or not the Cloth Hall still exists. Its
celebrated three-story facade exists, with a huge hiatus in it to the
left of the middle, and, of course, minus all glass. The entire facade
seemed to me to be leaning slightly forward; I could not decide
whether this was an optical delusion or a fact. The enormous central
tower is knocked to pieces, and yet conserves some remnant of its
original outlines; bits of scaffolding on the sides of it stick out at a
great height like damaged matches. The slim corner towers are
scarcely hurt. Everything of artistic value in the structure of the
interior has disappeared in a horrible confusion of rubble. The
eastern end of the Cloth Hall used to be terminated by a small
beautiful Renaissance edifice called the Niewwerk, dating from the
seventeenth century. What its use was I never knew; but the
Niewwerk has vanished, and the Town Hall next door has also
vanished; broken walls, a few bits of arched masonry, and heaps of
refuse alone indicate where these buildings stood in April last.
So much for the two principal buildings visible from the Grande
Place. The Cloth Hall is in the Grande Place, and the Cathedral
adjoins it. The only other fairly large building in the Place is the
Hopital de Notre Dame at the north-east end. This white-painted
erection, with its ornamental gilt sign, had continued substantially to
exist as a structural entity; it was defaced, but not seriously. Every
other building in the place was smashed up. To walk right round the
Place is to walk nearly half a mile; and along the entire length, with
the above exceptions, there was nothing but mounds of rubbish
and fragments of upstanding walls. Here and there in your
perambulation you may detect an odour with which certain trenches
have already familiarised you. Obstinate inhabitants were apt to get
buried in the cellars where they had taken refuge. In one place what
looked like a colossal sewer had been uncovered. I thought at the
time that the sewer was somewhat large for a city of the size of
Ypres, and it has since occurred to me that this sewer may have
been the ancient bed of the stream Yperlee, which in some past
period was arched over.
"I want to make a rough sketch of all this," I said to my companions
in the middle of the Grande Place, indicating the Cloth Hall, and the
Cathedral, and other grouped ruins. The spectacle was, indeed,
majestic in the extreme, and if the British Government has not had it
officially photographed in the finest possible manner, it has failed in
a very obvious duty; detailed photographs of Ypres ought to be
distributed throughout the world.
My companions left me to myself. I sat down on the edge of a small
shell-hole some distance in front of the Hospital. I had been advised
not to remain too near the building lest it might fall on me. The
paved floor of the Place stretched out around me like a tremendous
plain, seeming the vaster because my eyes were now so much
nearer to the level of it. On a bit of facade to the left the word "CYCLE
" stood out in large black letters on a white ground. This word and
myself were the sole living things in the Square. In the distance a
cloud of smoke up a street showed that a house was burning. The
other streets visible from where I sat gave no sign whatever. The
wind, strong enough throughout my visit to the Front, was now
stronger than ever. All the window-frames and doors in the Hospital
were straining and creaking in the wind. The loud sound of guns
never ceased. A large British aeroplane hummed and buzzed at a
considerable height overhead. Dust drove along.