The motor-lorry blundered forward toward a stone obelisk planted on a man-made hillock. On one side was a swamp of green stagnant water; on the other was a planting out of many hundred crosses of unvarnished wood. The lorry is full of crosses each named and numbered, roped up in scores, and these must be dumped inside the enclosure.
The view from the Polygon monument is desolation on all sides. One living man standing there is as it were monarch of all the dead. It is a remarkable eminence, a pillar at Thermopylæ, one thing standing where all else is lying flat. As it stands to-day it has no inscription. Polygon—myriad-sided—it is one of the strangest standing places and shrines of the war. Pause thou who livest: salute the dead!
Back thunders the empty lorry—on to the Menin road—and faces Ypres. You see the grey contour of the tower afar, but doubt whether you are approaching a city, so flat has all become. Yet certainly it is Ypres. You enter by a series of new-painted wooden taverns and hotels. You walk up a wide main street and there is Ypres——
A great dust storm is raging here whilst the sun shines out of a perfect sky. Here are no rushes, no wild flowers, no moisture, but only infinite debris and the shatterings of old masonry. There is a suggestion of the desert. A notice says "This is Holy Ground" and a barbed wire fence runs round the whole centre of old Ypres. Within that enclosure lies a ruined city. Thousands of years ago such a thing happened; all the people were slain or taken into bondage. No one came back, the victors went away, and the ruins remained glaring in the sands—centuries, millenniums. That is the impression of Ypres to-day. It is grim and moving. It is like the Pyramids. At least a hundred thousand dead lie round it—an inner circle of the dead and an outer circle of decay. Looking on those spacious sun-steeped, sand-blown ruins one's mind is inevitably taken to the East, and a sense of Shelley's poem comes to one—
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.
Yet six years ago the Cloth Hall tower chimed the quarter-hours! The road out from the Menin gate was shady. Polygon Wood was a wood, not a monument. There was seemingly a château near a wood called Hooge. Zandwoorde Church had a spire. Behold the army however digging itself in. There are rudimentary lines of defence making a spider's web across the Menin road. The Twentieth Brigade flounders from Zandwoorde to Gheluvelt in newly upturned earth. The Germans who followed so rapidly to Ghent and Thielt and Roulers are hot on the trail, expecting Ypres also to be left to them without a blow. But they have not arrived. Our men are sitting on the parapets of their trenches, singing. There have been no casualties to mention, a few men lost sight of; three sentries in fact left unrelieved at Ghent. There is a battalion of Guards in the line at Klein Zillebeke, and not one has yet been killed or wounded. A battle is coming, however, for the retirement has ceased.
You turn out of Ypres by the left hand on a road which faces Kemmel Hill—the Wytschaete road, and you come to a flattened-out village at cross-roads, called Kruistraat. Where were once ploughed fields is now a land-ocean of humps and hollows with a foam of wild flowers. Plunging toward Voormezeele one is intoxicated by a perfume and looking to the right you see the cause in a field of thistles as thick and close as wheat. At what was Voormezeele there is now nothing more remarkable than the crosses of the P.P.C.L.I. the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, who evidently went down in the most terrible way in 1915. Were not these the Canadians who first tasted the devilry of gas?
Cemeteries soon become all too frequent and unremarkable. At Klein Zillebeke there is an Englishwoman going from grave to grave diligently examining the aluminium ribbons on which the names are fixed to the wooden crosses—looking perhaps for her husband's grave but with an expression in her face and form of "They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him."
Virbranden Molen, where many encamped, is but a name now, and eastward the wire-covered duck-boards climb across the rushes and thistles to what was once a front line, past derelict limbers with rusty broken wheels, past unexploded five-nines—the wildest way. Reeds have filled the trenches, grass long and withered swarms o'er the parapets. There are heaps of rusty Mills bombs which no one has ever come to take away and no one will; there are ration-tins; there is all manner of army rubbish everywhere. Pilgrims and tourists evidently collect few souvenirs on the old Ypres front, and few Americans as yet arrive at Ypres, which has for them a lesser fame than Château Thierry and Verdun.