I saw in a newspaper a few days ago some pictures of the ruins of the Cloth
Hall and the Cathedral at Ypres. They were excellent photographs, but the
impression they left on my mind was of the futility even of photography to
convey any real sense of that astonishing scene of desolation which was
once the beautiful city of Ypres. We talk of Ypres as if it were still a
city in being, in which men trade, and children play, and women go about
their household duties. In a vague way we feel that it is so. In a vague
way I felt that it was so myself until I entered it and found myself in the
presence of the ghost of a city.
How wonderful is the solitude and the silence in the midst of which it
stands like the ruin of some ancient and forgotten civilisation. Far behind
you have left the hurry and tumult of the great armies--every village
seething with a strange and tumultuous life, soldiers bargaining with the
women for potatoes and cabbages in the marketplace, boiling their pots in
the fields, playing football by the way side, mending the roads, marching,
camping, feeding, sleeping; officers flying along the roads on horseback or
in motorcars, vast processions of lorries coiling their way over the
landscape, or standing at rest with their death-dealing burdens while the
men take their mid-day meal; giant "caterpillars" dragging great guns along
the highway. Everywhere the sense of a fearful urgency, everywhere the
feeling of a brooding and awful presence that overshadows the heavens with
a cosmic menace. It is as though you are living on the slopes of some vast
volcano whose eruptions may at any moment submerge all this phantasmal life
in a sea of molten lava. And, hark! through the sounds of the roads and the
streets, the chaffering of the market-place, the rush of motor-cars, the
rhythmic tramp of men, there comes a dull, hollow roar, as from the mouth
of a volcano itself.
As you advance the scene changes. The movement becomes more feverish, more
intense. The very breath of the volcano seems to fan your cheek, and the
hollow roar has become near and plangent. It is no longer like the breaking
of great seas on a distant shore: it is like thunder rending the sky above
you. A little further, and another subtle change is observable. On either
hand the land has become solitary and unkempt. All the life of the fields
has vanished and the soldiers are in undisputed possession. Then even the
soldiers seem left behind, and you enter the strange solitude where the war
is waged. Before you rises the great mound of Ypres. In the distance it
looks like a living city with quaintly broken skyline, but as you approach
you see that it is only the tomb of a city standing there desolate and
shattered in the midst of a universal desolation.
It is midday as you pass through its streets, but there is no moving thing
visible amidst the ruins. The very spirit of loneliness is about you--not
the invigorating loneliness of the mountain tops, but the sad loneliness of
the grave. I have stood upon the ruins of Carthage, but even there I did
not feel the same sense of solitude that I felt as I walked the streets of
Ypres. There, at least, the birds were singing above you, and the Arab sat
beside his camel on the grass in the sunshine. Here nature itself seems
blasted by some dreadful flame of death. The streets preserve their
contours, but on either side the houses stand like gaunt skeletons,
roofless and shattered, fronts knocked out, floors smashed through or
hanging in fragments, bedsteads tumbling down through the broken ceiling of
the sitting-room, pictures askew on the tottering walls, household
treasures a forlorn wreckage, hats still hanging on the hat-pegs, the
table-cloth still laid, the fireplace lustreless with the ashes of the last
fire.
And in the centre of this scene of utter misery the Cathedral and the Cloth
Hall, still towering above the general desolation, sublime even in their
ruin, the roofs gone, the interiors a heap of rubbish--the rubbish of
priceless things--the outer walls battered and broken, but standing as they
have stood for centuries. Most wonderful of all, as I saw it, a single
pinnacle of the Cloth Hall still standing above the wreck, slender and
exquisitely carven, pointing like an accusing finger to the eternal
tribunal. For long the Germans had been shelling that Finger of Ypres. They
shelled it the afternoon I was there and filled the market-place with great
masses of masonry from the walls. But they shelled it in vain, and as I
left Ypres in the twilight, when the thunder of the guns had ceased, and
looked back on the great mound of "the city that was," I saw above the
ruins the finger still pointing heavenward.
But if the solitude of Ypres is memorable, the silence is terrible. It is
the silence of imminent and breathless things, full of strange secrets,
thrilling with a fearful expectation, broken by sudden and shattering
voices that speak and then are still--voices that seem to come out of the
bowels of the earth near at hand and are answered by voices more distant,
the vicious hiss of the shrapnel, the crisp rattle of the machine-guns, the
roar of "Mother," that sounds like an invisible express train thundering
through the sky above you. The solitude and the silence assume an
oppressive significance. They are only the garment of the mighty mystery
that envelops you. You feel that these dead walls have ears, eyes, and most
potent voices, that you are not in the midst of a great loneliness, but
that all around the earth is full of most tremendous secrets. And then you
realise that the city that is as dead as Nineveh to the outward eye is the
most vital city in the world.
One day it will rise from its ashes, its streets will resound once more
with jest and laughter, its fires will be relit, and its chimneys will send
forth the cheerful smoke. But its glory throughout all the ages will be the
memory of the days when it stood a mound of ruins on the plain with its
finger pointing in mute appeal to heaven against the infamies of men.