I was afraid. But I was less afraid of a shell than of the intense
loneliness. Rheims was inhabited; Arras was inhabited. In both
cities there were postmen and newspapers, shops, and even cafes.
But in Ypres there was nothing. Every street was a desert; every
room in every house was empty. Not a dog roamed in search of
food. The weight upon my heart was sickening. To avoid complications
I had promised the Staff officer not to move from the Place until
he returned; neither of us had any desire to be hunting for each
other in the sinister labyrinth of the town's thoroughfares. I
was, therefore, a prisoner in the Place, condemned to solitary
confinement. I ardently wanted my companions to come back. . . .
Then I heard echoing sounds of voices and footsteps. Two British
soldiers appeared round a corner and passed slowly along the
Square. In the immensity of the Square they made very small
figures. I had a wish to accost them, but Englishmen do not do
these things, even in Ypres. They glanced casually at me; I glanced
casually at them, carefully pretending that the circumstances of my
situation were entirely ordinary.
I felt safer while they were in view; but when they had gone I was
afraid again. I was more than afraid; I was inexplicably uneasy. I
made the sketch simply because I had said that I would make it.
And as soon as it was done, I jumped up out of the hole and walked
about, peering down streets for the reappearance of my friends. I
was very depressed, very irritable; and I honestly wished that I had
never accepted any invitation to visit the Front. I somehow thought I
might never get out of Ypres alive. When at length I caught sight of
the Staff officer I felt instantly relieved. My depression, however,
remained for hours afterwards.
Perhaps the chief street in Ypres is the wide Rue de Lille, which
runs from opposite the Cloth Hall down to the Lille Gate, and over
the moat water into the Lille road and on to the German lines. The
Rue de Lille was especially famous for its fine old buildings. There
was the Hospice Belle, for old female paupers of Ypres, built in the
thirteenth century. There was the Museum, formerly the Hotel
Merghelynck, not a very striking edifice, but full of antiques of all
kinds. There was the Hospital of St. John, interesting, but less
interesting than the Hospital of St. John at Bruges. There was the
Gothic Maison de Bois, right at the end of the street, with a rather
wonderful frontage. And there was the famous fourteenth-century
Steenen, which since my previous visit had been turned into the
post office. With the exception of this last building, the whole of the
Rue de Lille, if my memory is right, lay in ruins. The shattered post
office was splendidly upright, and in appearance entire; but, for all I
know, its interior may have been destroyed by a shell through the
roof. Only the acacia-trees flourished, and the flies, and the weeds
between the stones of the paving. The wind took up the dust from
the rubbish heaps which had been houses and wreathed it against
what bits of walls still maintained the perpendicular. Here, too, was
the unforgettable odour, rising through the interstices of the
smashed masonry which hid subterranean chambers.
We turned into a side-street of small houses--probably the homes of
lace-makers. The street was too humble to be a mark for the guns
of the Germans, who, no doubt, trained their artillery by the aid of a
very large scale municipal map on which every building was
separately indicated. It would seem impossible that a map of less
than a foot to a mile could enable them to produce such wonderful
results of carefully wanton destruction. And the assumption must be
that the map was obtained from the local authorities by some agent
masquerading as a citizen. I heard, indeed, that known citizens of all
the chief towns returned to their towns or to the vicinity thereof in the
uniform and with the pleasing manners of German warriors. The
organisation for doing good to Belgium against Belgium's will was an
incomparable piece of chicane and pure rascality. Strange--Belgians
were long ago convinced that the visitation was inevitably coming,
and had fallen into the habit of discussing it placidly over their beer
at nights.
To return to the side-street. So far as one could see, it had not
received a dent, not a scratch. Even the little windows of the little
red houses were by no means all broken. All the front doors stood
ajar. I hesitated to walk in, for these houses seemed to be
mysteriously protected by influences invisible. But in the end the
vulgar, yet perhaps legitimate, curiosity of the sightseer, of the
professional reporter, drove me within the doors. The houses were
so modest that they had no entrance-halls or lobbies. One passed
directly from the street into the parlour. Apparently the parlours were
completely furnished. They were in an amazing disorder, but the
furniture was there. And the furnishings of all of them were alike, as
the furnishings of all the small houses of a street in the Five Towns
or in a cheap London suburb. The ambition of these homes had
been to resemble one another. What one had all must have. Under
ordinary circumstances the powerful common instinct to resemble is
pitiable. But here it was absolutely touching.
Everything was in these parlours. The miserable, ugly ornaments,
bought and cherished and admired by the simple, were on the
mantelpieces. The drawers of the mahogany and oak furniture had
been dragged open, but not emptied. The tiled floors were littered
with clothes, with a miscellany of odd possessions, with pots and
pans out of the kitchen and the scullery, with bags and boxes. The
accumulations of lifetimes were displayed before me, and it was
almost possible to trace the slow transforming of young girls into
brides, and brides into mothers of broods.
Within the darkness of the interiors I could discern the stairs. But I
was held back from the stairs. I could get no further than the
parlours, though the interest of the upper floors must have been
surpassing.
So from house to house. I handled nothing. Were not the military
laws against looting of the most drastic character! And at last I
came to the end of the little street. There are many such streets in
Ypres. In fact, the majority of the streets were like that street. I did
not visit them, but I have no doubt that they were in the same
condition. I do not say that the inhabitants fled taking naught with
them. They must obviously have taken what they could, and what
was at once most precious and most portable. But they could have
taken very little. They departed breathless without vehicles, and
probably most of the adults had children to carry or to lead. At one
moment the houses were homes, functioning as such. An alarm,
infectious like the cholera, and at the next moment the deserted
houses became spiritless, degenerated into intolerable museums
for the amazement of a representative of the American and the
British Press! Where the scurrying families went to I never even
inquired. Useless to inquire. They just lost themselves on the face of
the earth, and were henceforth known to mankind by the generic
name of "refugees"--such of them as managed to get away alive.
After this the solitude of the suburbs, with their maimed and rusting
factories, their stagnant canals, their empty lots, their high, lusty
weeds, their abolished railway and train stations, was a secondary
matter leaving practically no impression on the exhausted
sensibility.
A few miles on the opposite side of the town were the German
artillery positions, with guns well calculated to destroy Cathedrals
and Cloth Halls. Around these guns were educated men who had
spent years--indeed, most of their lives--in the scientific study of
destruction. Under these men were slaves who, solely for the
purposes of destruction, had ceased to be the free citizens they
once were. These slaves were compelled to carry out any order
given to them, under pain of death. They had, indeed, been
explicitly told on the highest earthly authority that, if the order came
to destroy their fathers and their brothers, they must destroy their
fathers and their brothers: the instruction was public and historic.
The whole organism has worked, and worked well, for the
destruction of all that was beautiful in Ypres, and for the break-up of
an honourable tradition extending over at least eight centuries. The
operation was the direct result of an order. The order had been
carefully weighed and considered. The successful execution of it
brought joy into many hearts, high and low. "Another shell in the
Cathedral!" And men shook hands ecstatically around the excellent
guns. "A hole in the tower of the Cloth Hall." General rejoicing! "The
population has fled, and Ypres is a desert!" Inexpressible
enthusiasm among specially educated men, from the highest to the
lowest. So it must have been. There was no hazard about the
treatment of Ypres. The shells did not come into Ypres out of
nowhere. Each was the climax of a long, deliberate effort originating
in the brains of the responsible leaders. One is apt to forget all this.
"But," you say, "this is war, after all." After all, it just is.
The future of Ypres exercises the mind. Ypres is only one among
many martyrs. But, as matters stand at present it is undoubtedly the
chief one. In proportion to their size, scores of villages have suffered
as much as Ypres, and some have suffered more. But no city of its
mercantile, historical, and artistic importance has, up to now,
suffered in the same degree as Ypres. Ypres is entitled to rank as
the very symbol of the German achievement in Belgium. It stood
upon the path to Calais; but that was not its crime. Even if German
guns had not left one brick upon another in Ypres, the path to Calais
would not thereby have been made any easier for the well-shod feet
of the apostles of might, for Ypres never served as a military
stronghold and could not possibly have so served; and had the
Germans known how to beat the British Army in front of Ypres, they
could have marched through the city as easily as a hyena through a
rice-crop. The crime of Ypres was that it lay handy for the extreme
irritation of an army which, with three times the men and three times
the guns, and thirty times the vainglorious conceit, could not shift
the trifling force opposed to it last autumn. Quite naturally the
boasters were enraged. In the end, something had to give way. And
the Cathedral and Cloth Hall and other defenceless splendours of
Ypres gave way, not the trenches. The yearners after Calais did
themselves no good by exterminating fine architecture and breaking
up innocent homes, but they did experience the relief of smashing
something. Therein lies the psychology of the affair of Ypres, and
the reason why the Ypres of history has come to a sudden close.
In order to envisage the future of Ypres, it is necessary to get a
clear general conception of the damage done to it. Ypres is not
destroyed. I should estimate that when I saw it in July at least half
the houses in it were standing entire, and, though disfigured, were
capable of being rapidly repaired. Thousands of the humble of
Ypres could return to their dwellings and resume home-life there
with little trouble, provided that the economic situation was fairly
favourable--and, of course, sooner or later the economic situation is
bound to be favourable, for the simple reason that it must ultimately
depend upon the exertions of a people renowned throughout the
world for hard and continuous industry.
On the other hand, practically all that was spectacular in the city, all
the leading, all the centre round which civic activities had grouped
themselves for centuries, is destroyed. Take the Grande Place. If
Ypres is to persist in a future at all comparable to its immediate past
(to say nothing of its historic past), the privately owned buildings on
the Grande Place will, without exception, have to be begun all over
again, and before that task can be undertaken the foundations will
have to be cleared--a tremendous undertaking in itself. I do not
know how many privately owned buildings there were on the
Grande Place, but I will guess a hundred and fifty, probably none of
which was less than three stories in height. All these buildings
belonged to individuals, individuals who intimately possessed them
and counted on them as a source of income or well-being,
individuals who are now scattered, impoverished, and acutely
discouraged. The same is to be said of the Rue de Lille and of other
important streets.
Suppose the Germans back again in the land of justice, modesty,
and unselfishness; and suppose the property-owners of Ypres
collected once more in Ypres. The enterprise of reconstruction
facing them will make such a demand of initiative force and mere
faith as must daunt the most audacious among them. And capital
dragged out of a bankrupt Germany will by no means solve the
material problem. For labour will be nearly as scarce as money; the
call for labour in every field cannot fail to surpass in its urgency any
call in history. The simple contemplation of the gigantic job will be
staggering. To begin with, the withered and corrupt dead will have to
be excavated from the cellars, and when that day comes those will
be present who can say: "This skeleton was So-and-So's child,"
"That must have been my mother." Terrific hours await Ypres. And
when (or if) the buildings have been re-erected, tenants will have to
be found for them--and then think of the wholesale refurnishing!
The deep human instinct which attaches men and women to a
particular spot of the earth's surface is so powerful that almost
certainly the second incarnation of Ypres will be initiated, but that it
will be carried very far towards completion seems to me to be
somewhat doubtful. To my mind the new Ypres cannot be more
than a kind of camp amid the dark ruins of the old, and the city must
remain for generations, if not for ever, a ghastly sign and illustration
of what cupidity and stupidity and vanity can compass together
when physical violence is their instrument.
The immediate future of Ypres, after the war, is plain. It will instantly
become one of the show-places of the world. Hotels will appear out
of the ground, guides and touts will pullulate at the railway station,
the tour of the ruins will be mapped out, and the tourists and globe-
trotters of the whole planet will follow that tour in batches like staring
sheep. Much money will be amassed by a few persons out of the
exhibition of misfortune and woe. A sinister fate for a community!
Nevertheless, the thing must come to pass, and it is well that it
should come to pass. The greater the number of people who see
Ypres for themselves, the greater the hope of progress for mankind.
If the facade of the Cloth Hall can be saved, some such inscription
as the following ought to be incised along the length of it:
"On July 31st, 1914, The German Minister At Brussels Gave A
Positive And Solemn Assurance That Germany Had No Intention Of
Violating The Neutrality Of Belgium. Four Days Later The German
Army Invaded Belgium. Look Around."
When you are walking through that which was Ypres, nothing
arouses a stronger feeling--half contempt, half anger--than the
thought of the mean, miserable, silly, childish, and grotesque
excuses which the wit of Germany has invented for her deliberately
planned crime. And nothing arouses a more grim and sweet
satisfaction than the thought that she already has the gravest
reason to regret it, and would give her head not to have committed
it. Despite all vauntings, all facile chatterings about the alleged co-
operation of an unknowable and awful God, all shriekings of unity
and power, all bellowings about the perfect assurance of victory, all
loud countings of the fruits of victory--the savage leaders of the
deluded are shaking in their shoes before the anticipated sequel of
an outrage ineffable alike in its barbarism and in its idiocy.