Not a few farmers were killed; they also were heroes, for they died at their posts. But no patriotic cockade marks their humble graves. Plentiful now are the crosses ornamented with flowers and the red, white and blue, for those morts pour la patrie. Above Ardoye the first-noticed wayside cemetery of German soldiers appears, and there lies Franz Delmann, of Chemnitz, and many others who died in November, 1917. It is high up on a ridge beside the position of an old German battery. How the shells used to howl from this eminence over Roulers, over Passchendaele and leagues of destruction right into Ypres itself! Here in old days the grubby war-worn Germans plied the guns, and here the British guns found their prey also, and our enemies were put to sleep in this acre of death. Now most of the crosses are down, the cross-pieces of others have been taken away, part of the field has been dug up with a spade. For after all the ground is appropriated Belgian property. It was never paid for and it reverts to its owner, dead and all. What a pathetic tragedy is that of the dead the Germans left behind! Each cross, each dead one, refers back to some living family, some home, some set of human circumstances. What thoughts, what questions do not go out on the air from obscure homes to the dead who have been left behind! The reins which go from the living to the dead!
But enemies take little stock of one another's dead. Roulers, which is vis-à-vis to Ypres, lay partially destroyed and now it is being builded up again. If the dead could be made to pay for it the dead would. The living for the living! Roulers was a fine city once. The creative eye sees that it can be so again. The British gunners could have laid it flat as Ypres but they did not. Ypres can never be raised. But Roulers will be Roulers once again. As one approaches it, behold, what activity. New houses have sprung up overnight. There are thousands of piles of bricks. Every Belgian has learned bricklaying. Clerks, shopkeepers, salesmen, porters, in shirt sleeves and plaster-sprinkled hats, are at work—without trade union rules. Hundreds of thousands of whitish vermilion flesh-coloured old bricks are being made fit to use again, new bricks in tiers are apparent in improvised kilns, and all day and every day sounds the chipping and slapping of real reconstruction. Iron girders are being fitted into the gutted depths of old shop-fronts, and with foundations and framework it is marvellous how speedily old houses are built up. The city is poor. Its many factory chimneys are innocent of smoke. Roulers for flax! It was famous for its linen industry. Two Scotch engineers, met at a hotel, are fitting in new machinery in the factories. Typical uncommunicative Britons, they volunteer no information, but sit face to face over their meals, lean over their food and chuckle to one another in private monosyllables. When asked how they are getting on, one of them replies:
"Och slowly, man, slowly. They Chairmans didna leave muckle when they went awa!"
And six years ago the Army continued to fall back. Zeebruges whence it had started, Bruges and Ostende, and Ghent which it had marched through, became enemy country without much shedding of blood. No one stood long for their defence. After Roulers the name of a much less famous place than Bruges or Ghent came on to men's lips. Did they know that they were going to stand for the defence of it? No, it is all unlikely. And as they marched to Ypres they providentially did not know the four years' hell of which they trod the stage. War all over by Christmas was their thought if they thought at all as they marched o'er the ridge of Passchendaele in October, 1914.
The soldier, it is said, has an elementary mind which does not imagine, does not think—a regimental mind. Others therefore must think about him and do the thinking for him. See, the dusty khaki-clad regulars as yet unbaptised by fire, but unknowingly on the brink of annihilation, treading the ground where
Few shall part where many meet...
And every turf beneath their feet
Shall be a soldier's sepulchre.
Thus they marched into Ypres—"as pretty a town as you'd care to see after a day's march." Oh, it's highly romantic to look back to it now.
Banners yellow, glorious golden,
On its roof did float and flow.
This, all this, was in the olden time
Long ago.
The business centre of Ypres was invested with a dignity which was not merely commercial in those old days when the silver chimes rolled regularly the quarter-hours from the Cloth Hall tower. And the Army arrived, the army for the defence of Ypres. They will dig trenches and throw out wire south of Ypres, looking at Kemmel without knowing its name, walking on Hill 60 before it was numbered and named.