The city of Ypres was the capital of our battlefields in Flanders from
the beginning to the end of the war, and the ground on which it stands,
whether a new city rises there or its remnants of ruin stay as a
memorial of dreadful things, will be forever haunted by the spirit of
those men of ours who passed through its gates to fight in the fields
beyond or to fall within its ramparts.
I went through Ypres so many times in early days and late days of the
war that I think I could find my way about it blindfold, even now. I saw
it first in March of 1915, before the battle when the Germans first
used poison-gas and bombarded its choking people, and French and British
soldiers, until the city fell into a chaos of masonry. On that first
visit I found it scarred by shell--fire, and its great Cloth Hall was
roofless and licked out by the flame of burning timbers, but most of the
buildings were still standing and the shops were busy with customers
in khaki, and in the Grande Place were many small booths served by the
women and girls who sold picture post-cards and Flemish lace and fancy
cakes and soap to British soldiers sauntering about without a thought of
what might happen here in this city, so close to the enemy's lines, so
close to his guns. I had tea in a bun-shop, crowded with young officers,
who were served by two Flemish girls, buxom, smiling, glad of all the
English money they were making.
A few weeks later the devil came to Ypres. The first sign of his work
was when a mass of French soldiers and colored troops, and English,
Irish, Scottish, and Canadian soldiers came staggering through the Lille
and Menin gates with panic in their look, and some foul spell upon them.
They were gasping for breath, vomiting, falling into unconsciousness,
and, as they lay, their lungs were struggling desperately against some
stifling thing. A whitish cloud crept up to the gates of Ypres, with a
sweet smell of violets, and women and girls smelled it and then gasped
and lurched as they ran and fell. It was after that when shells came in
hurricane flights over Ypres, smashing the houses and setting them
on fire, until they toppled and fell inside themselves. Hundreds of
civilians hid in their cellars, and many were buried there. Others
crawled into a big drain-pipe--there were wounded women and children
among them, and a young French interpreter, the Baron de Rosen, who
tried to help them--and they stayed there three days and nights, in
their vomit and excrement and blood, until the bombardment ceased. Ypres
was a city of ruin, with a red fire in its heart where the Cloth Hall
and cathedral smoldered below their broken arches and high ribs of
masonry that had been their buttresses and towers.
When I went there two months later I saw Ypres as it stood through the
years of the war that followed, changing only in the disintegration of
its ruin as broken walls became more broken and fallen houses were raked
into smaller fragments by new bombardments, for there was never a day
for years in which Ypres was not shelled.
The approach to it was sinister after one had left Poperinghe and passed
through the skeleton of Vlamertinghe church, beyond Goldfish Chateau...
For a long time Poperinghe was the last link with a life in which men
and women could move freely without hiding from the pursuit of death;
and even there, from time to time, there were shells from long-range
guns and, later, night-birds dropping high-explosive eggs. Round about
Poperinghe, by Reninghelst and Locre, long convoys of motor-wagons,
taking up a new day's rations from the rail-heads, raised clouds of dust
which powdered the hedges white. Flemish cart-horses with huge
fringes of knotted string wended their way between motor-lorries and
gun-limbers. Often the sky was blue above the hop-gardens, with fleecy
clouds over distant woodlands and the gray old towers of Flemish
churches and the windmills on Mont Rouge and Mont Neir, whose sails have
turned through centuries of peace and strife. It all comes back to me as
I write--that way to Ypres, and the sounds and the smells of the roads
and fields where the traffic of war went up, month after month, year
after year.
That day when I saw it first, after the gas-attack, was strangely quiet,
I remember. There was “nothing doing,” as our men used to say. The
German gunners seemed asleep in the noonday sun, and it was a charming
day for a stroll and a talk about the raving madness of war under every
old hedge.
“What about lunch in Dickebusch on the way up?” asked one of my
companions. There were three of us.
It seemed a good idea, and we walked toward the village which then--they
were early days!--looked a peaceful spot, with a shimmer of sunshine
above its gray thatch and red-tiled roofs.
Suddenly one of us said, “Good God!”
An iron door had slammed down the corridors of the sky and the hamlet
into which we were just going was blotted out by black smoke, which came
up from its center as though its market-place had opened up and vomited
out infernal vapors.
“A big shell that!” said one man, a tall, lean-limbed officer, who later
in the war was sniper-in-chief of the British army. Something enraged
him at the sight of that shelled village.
“Damn them!” he said. “Damn the war! Damn all dirty dogs who smash up
life!”
Four times the thing happened, and we were glad there had been a minute
or so between us and Dickebusch. (In Dickebusch my young cobbler friend
from Fleet Street was crouching low, expecting death.) The peace of the
day was spoiled. There was seldom a real peace on the way to Ypres. The
German gunners had wakened up again. They always did. They were getting
busy, those house-wreckers. The long rush of shells tore great holes
through the air. Under a hedge, with our feet in the ditch, we ate the
luncheon we had carried in our pockets.
“A silly idea!” said the lanky man, with a fierce, sad look in his eyes.
He was Norman-Irish, and a man of letters, and a crack shot, and all the
boys he knew were being killed.
“What's silly?” I asked, wondering what particular foolishness he was
thinking of, in a world of folly.
“Silly to die with a broken bit of sandwich in one's mouth, just because
some German fellow, some fat, stupid man a few miles away, looses off a
bit of steel in search of the bodies of men with whom he has no personal
acquaintance.”
“Damn silly,” I said.
“That's all there is to it in modern warfare,” said the lanky man. “It's
not like the old way of fighting, body to body. Your strength against
your enemy's, your cunning against his. Now it is mechanics and
chemistry. What is the splendor of courage, the glory of youth, when
guns kill at fifteen miles?”
Afterward this man went close to the enemy, devised tricks to make him
show his head, and shot each head that showed.
The guns ceased fire. Their tumult died down, and all was quiet again.
It was horribly quiet on our way into Ypres, across the railway, past
the red-brick asylum, where a calvary hung unscathed on broken walls,
past the gas-tank at the crossroads. This silence was not reassuring, as
our heels clicked over bits of broken brick on our way into Ypres. The
enemy had been shelling heavily for three-quarters of an hour in the
morning. There was no reason why he should not begin again... I
remember now the intense silence of the Grande Place that day after
the gas-attack, when we three men stood there looking up at the charred
ruins of the Cloth Hall. It was a great solitude of ruin. No living
figure stirred among the piles of masonry which were tombstones above
many dead. We three were like travelers who had come to some capital
of an old and buried civilization, staring with awe and uncanny fear at
this burial-place of ancient splendor, with broken traces of peoples who
once had lived here in security. I looked up at the blue sky above those
white ruins, and had an idea that death hovered there like a hawk ready
to pounce. Even as one of us (not I) spoke the thought, the signal came.
It was a humming drone high up in the sky.
“Look out!” said the lanky man. “Germans!”
It was certain that two birds hovering over the Grande Place were
hostile things, because suddenly white puffballs burst all round them,
as the shrapnel of our own guns scattered about them. But they flew
round steadily in a half-circle until they were poised above our heads.
It was time to seek cover, which was not easy to find just there, where
masses of stonework were piled high. At any moment things might drop. I
ducked my head behind a curtain of bricks as I heard a shrill “coo-ee!”
from a shell. It burst close with a scatter, and a tin cup was flung
against a bit of wall close to where the lanky man sat in a shell-hole.
He picked it up and said, “Queer!” and then smelled it, and said
“Queer!” again. It was not an ordinary bomb. It had held some poisonous
liquid from a German chemist's shop. Other bombs were dropping round
as the two hostile airmen circled overhead, untouched still by the
following shell-bursts. Then they passed toward their own lines, and my
friend in the shell-hole called to me and said, “Let's be going.”
It was time to go.
When we reached the edge of the town our guns away back started
shelling, and we knew the Germans would answer. So we sat in a field
nearby to watch the bombardment. The air moved with the rushing waves
which tracked the carry of each shell from our batteries, and over Ypres
came the high singsong of the enemies' answering voice.
As the dusk fell there was a movement out from Vlamertinghe, a movement
of transport wagons and marching men. They were going up in the darkness
through Ypres--rations and reliefs. They were the New Army men of the
West Riding.
“Carry on there,” said a young officer at the head of his company.
Something in his eyes startled me. Was it fear, or an act of sacrifice?
I wondered if he would be killed that night. Men were killed most nights
on the way through Ypres, sometimes a few and sometimes many. One shell
killed thirty one night, and their bodies lay strewn, headless and
limbless, at the corner of the Grande Place. Transport wagons galloped
their way through, between bursts of shell-fire, hoping to dodge them,
and sometimes not dodging them. I saw the litter of their wheels and
shafts, and the bodies of the drivers, and the raw flesh of the dead
horses that had not dodged them. Many men were buried alive in Ypres,
under masses of masonry when they had been sleeping in cellars, and were
wakened by the avalanche above them. Comrades tried to dig them out,
to pull away great stones, to get down to those vaults below from which
voices were calling; and while they worked other shells came and laid
dead bodies above the stones which had entombed their living comrades.
That happened, not once or twice, but many times in Ypres.
There was a Town Major of Ypres. Men said it was a sentence of death
to any officer appointed to that job. I think one of them I met had had
eleven predecessors. He sat in a cellar of the old prison, with walls of
sandbags on each side of him, but he could not sit there very long at
a stretch, because it was his duty to regulate the traffic according to
the shell-fire. He kept a visitors' book as a hobby, until it was buried
under piles of prison, and was a hearty, cheerful soul, in spite of the
menace of death always about him.