In the smiling country of the Mendips, in Somersetshire, there stands a little village church alone by itself in the fields, remote from the village to which it has given its name. In my schoolboy days in Somersetshire they used to tell me that that church—the name of which has gone from me—was the last survival of one of the villages devastated by the Black Death when it ravaged England in the fourteenth century.
They said, I remember, that the villagers could not plough the fields about the ancient church, for the stones and bricks of the vanished hamlet were still lying just beneath the surface. In later years men had built another village to take the place of that which was dead, but had placed it away from the original site, so that only the little church remained amid the fallow fields to speak to future generations of a little corner of England razed from the face of the earth.
The picture of that little Somersetshire church came drifting back to me over a long span of years when I went back to Ypres on a sunny morning in May, a week or so after the second great attempt of the Germans, reinforced by asphyxiating gas, to burst their way through to the sea had failed. “Lucia e morte, la bella Lucia!” runs the old Italian song. Ypres, beautiful Ypres, was dead, and Death had strewn all the approaches to the city with the hideous emblems of his trade.
From April 24 to May 13 a second great struggle had raged about Ypres, where our line bent out in a wide salient round the city. Ypres was shelled incessantly throughout the battle with artillery of the heaviest calibre, and our reinforcements, rushed up from other parts of the line, met on their way into Ypres the long and melancholy procession of refugees again seeking safety in flight, while the huge German “fat Berthas,” as the Boches call their 17-inch shells, exploded noisily in the emptying city.
I remember arriving in Lisbon at three o’clock on a bright moonlit October night on the day following the revolution. The Sud-Express, which brought me down from Paris, was the first train into the Portuguese capital since the overthrow of the Monarchy. The Central Station was battered by artillery fire, the houses in the Avenida da Liberdade were torn and pitted with shell-holes, and the city lay absolutely silent and deserted, the ruins hard and black in the brilliant white moonlight. Lisbon on that October night is the only city I have seen that even approximately resembled Ypres as I found it on that sunny May morning. Even so the resemblance was fallacious, for the battered corner of Lisbon which met my eyes on my arrival represented practically the whole of the damage done, and the prevailing silence was the silence of night, whereas Ypres was all destroyed, and the silence was the silence of death.
Neither St. Pierre, Martinique, nor Messina, nor Kingston, Jamaica—as I have it on the authority of men who visited those places after their destruction by earthquake, and who have also seen Ypres—produced on the mind such an overwhelming impression as the spectacle of this fair city of Flanders smitten with death all standing as it were. An earthquake or a cyclone will all but obliterate a city, will sweep across it, and leave a vast jumble of ruins in its passage. Bombardment, on the other hand, even the heaviest, will seldom wipe out the line of the streets, and the capricious path of the shells will leave standing single relics that recall in a flash all the beauty, all the intimacy, of the city that has passed away.
The great battle that had raged for three weeks about Ypres had spread on all sides the disorder of war. The warm air was heavy with the stench of dead horses putrefying in the sun, their torn carcasses lying athwart the roads or sprawling in the fields where German shells had rent great holes in the grass or brown earth. The little houses by the roadside—squalid hovels of staring red brick, for the most part—bore abundant traces of the passage of our soldiers to and from the fight. Here a broken rifle lay resting against the post of a door hanging lamentably on a single hinge and giving a glimpse of wild confusion within—furniture overturned, crockery broken, mattresses disembowelled, with the sunshine streaming in through a shell-hole in the roof. There lay a crumpled khaki overcoat beside a tangled heap of webbing equipment, with empty cartridge-cases scattered around. Heaps of empty shell-cases, ranging from the huge cylinder of the 4·7 gun to the natty little tube of the light field-gun, were piled up in the farmyards where deep wheel-ruts, empty fuse-boxes, and all the litter of batteries, showed where the gun emplacements had been. Here and there I caught sight of a cheerful English face in the little roadside houses. Some of our men were billeted there. Some of the faces were lathered, and a great sound of splashing and a strong odour of fried bacon announced that the breakfast-hour was at hand.
A lonely sentry standing against the wall of a shattered estaminet, a dead horse lying in a pool of blood in a gutter, a long vista of empty streets lined with roofless houses, jagged beams projecting into the void, jets of bricks spouted out across the cobble-stones amid charred fragments of furniture, and a silence so absolute, so heavy, that one might almost hear it—this was what the Hun had left of Ypres. Here, indeed, was the tragedy of Belgium, the horror of Louvain, the crime of Dinant. But murdered Ypres, as it seemed to me, cried out more loudly to Heaven for vengeance than her slaughtered sisters. Her destruction had been wrought from afar, the destroyer could not enter, her citizens had left her, her saviour shunned her. The city was empty, desolate, her toppling walls bending forward as though in grief for her children buried beneath the ruins, for the utter obliteration of five centuries of work and planning to the end of prosperity, happiness, and beauty.
The city lay silent in the sunshine, and a subtle odour of death crept out of nooks and crannies, where swarms of noisome flies danced eternally in the sunbeams. But the air above me was full of noise. Our heavy shells were passing over and about the city with a prodigious reverberating bang that seemed to shake the vault of heaven, followed by long-drawn-out gurgling rushes like the beating of wings of a host of lost angels. Now and then the scream of shells became louder on a different note. Then the sound stopped of a sudden, and was swallowed up in a deafening explosion mingling with an orange flash and a pillar of black or white smoke. Not even dead might Ypres find mercy at the hands of her tormentors. Morning and evening the Germans shelled the empty shell of a city, demolishing the ruins, rekindling fires that had burnt themselves out.
I paid many visits to Ypres. The dead city fascinated me. Every visit was for me a pious pilgrimage to the place of sacrifice of the best of England’s sons. The crumbling, battered remnant of the Cloth Hall, the roofless nave of St. Martin’s, the ruined houses of the Guilds, the four-square tower of the Abbey of Thérouanne, sliced and rent but not demolished—all those relics of a beauty that was Flemish were to me Belgium’s offering to the memories of the men who had laid down their lives that a great crime might be atoned. Some day, maybe, we shall know how many shells the Germans hurled into Ypres. I know that in all my visits to the ruined city I never found a single house that had escaped unscathed, and I passed through every quarter of the town.