By JOHN BUCHAN.
[D] _From “The History of the War.” By John Buchan. (Thos.
Nelson & Sons.)_
The present writer first saw Ypres from a little hill during the later
stages of the battle. It was a brilliant spring day, and, when there
was a lull in the bombardment and the sun lit up its white towers,
Ypres looked a gracious and delicate little city in its cincture of
green. It was with a sharp shock of surprise that one realised that it
was an illusion, that Ypres had become a shadow. A few days later, in
a pause of the bombardment, he entered the town. The main street lay
white and empty in the sun, and over all reigned a deathly stillness.
There was not a human being to be seen in all its length, and the
houses on each side were skeletons. There the whole front had gone, and
bedrooms with wrecked furniture were open to the light. There a 42-cm.
shell had made a breach in the line, with raw edges of masonry on both
sides, and a yawning pit below. In one room the carpet was spattered
with plaster from the ceiling, but the furniture was unbroken. There
was a Buhl cabinet with china, red plush chairs, a piano, and a
gramaphone--the plenishing of the best parlour of a middle-class home.
In another room was a sewing-machine, from which the owner had fled in
the middle of a piece of work. Here was a novel with the reader’s place
marked. It was like a city visited by an earthquake which had caught
the inhabitants unawares, and driven them shivering to a place of
refuge.
Through the gaps in the houses there were glimpses of greenery. A
broken door admitted to a garden--a carefully-tended garden, for the
grass had once been trimly kept, and the owner must have had a pretty
taste in spring flowers. A little fountain still plashed in a stone
basin. But in one corner an incendiary shell had fallen on the house,
and in the heap of charred débris there were human remains. Most of the
dead had been removed, but there were still bodies in out-of-the-way
comers. Over all hung a sickening smell of decay, against which the
lilacs and hawthorns were powerless. That garden was no place to tarry
in.
The street led into the Place, where once stood the great Church of
St. Martin and the Cloth Hall. Those who knew Ypres before the war
will remember the pleasant _façade_ of shops on the south side, and
the cluster of old Flemish buildings at the north-eastern corner.
Words are powerless to describe the devastation of these houses. Of
the southern side nothing remained but a file of gaunt gables. At the
northeast corner, if you crawled across the rubble, you could see the
remnants of some beautiful old mantelpieces. Standing in the middle
of the Place, one was oppressed by the utter silence, a silence which
seemed to hush and blanket the eternal shelling in the Salient beyond.
Some jackdaws were cawing from the ruins, and a painstaking starling
was rebuilding its nest in a broken pinnacle. An old cow, a miserable
object, was poking her head in the rubbish and sniffing curiously at a
dead horse. Sound was a profanation in that tomb which had once been a
city.
The Cloth Hall had lost all its arcades, most of its front, and there
were great rents everywhere. Its spire looked like a badly-whittled
stick, and the big gilt clock, with its hands irrevocably fixed,
hung loose on a jet of stone. St. Martin’s Church was a ruin, and
its stately square tower was so nicked and dinted that it seemed as
if a strong wind would topple it over. Inside the church was a weird
sight. Most of the windows had gone, and the famous rose window in the
southern transept lacked a segment. The side chapels were in ruins,
the floor was deep in fallen stones, but the pillars still stood. A
mass for the dead must have been in progress, for the altar was draped
in black, but the altar stone was cracked across. The sacristy was
full of vestments and candlesticks tumbled together in haste, and all
were covered with yellow picric dust from the high explosives. In the
graveyard behind there was a huge shell crater, 50 feet across and 20
feet deep, with human bones exposed in the sides. Before the main door
stood a curious piece of irony. An empty pedestal proclaimed from its
four sides the many virtues of a certain Belgian statesman who had been
also mayor of Ypres. The worthy mayor was lying in the dust beside it,
a fat man in a frock coat, with side-whiskers and a face like Bismarck.
Out in the sunlight there was the first sign of human life. A
detachment of French Colonial _tirailleurs_ entered from the
north--brown, shadowy men in fantastic weather-stained uniforms. A
vehicle stood at the cathedral door, and a lean and sad-faced priest
was loading it with some of the church treasures--chalices, plate,
embroidery. A Carmelite friar was prowling among the side alleys
looking for the dead. It was like some _macabre_ imagining of Victor
Hugo.
The ruins of old buildings are so familiar that they do not at first
dominate the mind. Far more arresting are the remnants of the pitiful
little homes, where there is no dignity, but a pathos which cries
aloud. Ypres was like a city destroyed by an earthquake; that is
the simplest and truest description. But the skeletons of her great
buildings, famous in Europe for 500 years, left another impression.
One felt, as at Pompeii, that things had always been so; one felt that
they were verily indestructible, they were so great in their fall.
The cloak of St. Martin was not needed to cover the nakedness of his
church. There was a terrible splendour about these gaunt and broken
structures, these noble, shattered _façades_, which defied their
destroyers. Ypres might be empty and a ruin, but to the end of time she
would be no mean city.
One of the truest of our younger poets, Rupert Brooke, who died while
serving in the Dardanelles, wrote in his last months a sonnet on the
consolation of death in war:--
“If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed.”
In the salient of Ypres there are not less than a hundred thousand
graves of Allied soldiers, sometimes marked by plain wooden crosses,
sometimes obliterated by the _débris_ of ruined trenches, sometimes
hidden in corners of fields and beneath clumps of chestnuts. That
ground is for ever England; and it is also for ever France, for there
the men of Dubois died around Bixschoote and on the Klein Zillebeke
ridge. When the war is over this triangle of meadowland, with a ruined
city for its base, will be an enclave of Belgian soil consecrated as
the holy land of two great peoples. It may be that it will be specially
set apart as a memorial place; it may be that it will be unmarked, and
that the country folk will till and reap as before over the vanishing
trench lines. But it will never be common ground. It will be for us
the most hallowed spot on earth, for it holds our bravest dust, and
it is the proof and record of a new spirit. In the past when we have
thought of Ypres we have thought of the British flag preserved there,
which Clare’s Regiment, fighting for France, captured at the Battle
of Ramillies. The name of the little Flemish town has recalled the
divisions in our own race and the centuries-old conflict between France
and Britain. But from now and henceforth it will have other memories.
It will stand as a symbol of unity and alliance--unity within our
Empire, unity within our Western civilization--that true alliance and
that lasting unity which are won and sealed by a common sacrifice.
[Illustration: BATTLE OF JUTLAND: FIRST SIGHT OF THE ENEMY’S HIGH SEAS
FLEET.
_Reproduced by permission of “The Illustrated London News.”_]