The atmosphere of Ypres was heavy with tragedy. Alone and unheeded I wandered from house to house—ever obsessed with the feeling that I was indecently intruding into another’s intimacy—amid the rich intérieurs of the old patrician families and the humble surroundings of the small shopkeepers. I rambled through the ancient cloisters of the Belle Hospice, where the exquisite Renaissance chapel had been destroyed save for a single delicate pillar still rearing its head aloft to where God’s blue heaven now formed the roof. I roamed through Ypres’ ruined churches, where the pigeons were fluttering to and fro over heaps of rubbish that on examination disintegrated themselves into fragments of old pictures, pieces of carved oak confessionals, remnants of prie-dieu, all dusted with the fine yellow powder scattered by the German high-explosive shells.
The sacristy of St. Martin’s, where the exquisitely embroidered sacred vestments still peeped out of their long, flat drawers, was ankle-deep in this dust. It lay over everything—on the linen sheets enveloping the magnificent copes on their wooden stands, on the Mass missals and vessels, on the old brass candelabra, even on the uniform of the Suisse cast hurriedly in a corner. One day I met an abbé who was seeking to salve what he could of the church treasures. With him was a Carmelite monk. The wizened old abbé and the tonsured monk in his brown and white habit dragging old pictures across the ruined square formed a picture that might have come straight out of the Middle Ages.
The fancy took me to see what the bombardment had left of the two museums of Ypres, containing valuable collections of old Flemish pottery and china and prints of the city. The Municipal Museum had been installed in the so-called Boucheries, a fine old colonnaded house opposite the Cloth Hall. The other had been housed in an old-world mansion, the Hotel Merghelynck, in the street that the French call the Rue de Lille and the Flemish the Rijssel-Straat, Rijssel being the Flemish name for Lille. Both museums were utterly destroyed. Whether the City Fathers of Ypres had removed the treasures of Ypres to a place of safety before the first bombardment I do not know, but of both museums only the blackened shell remained, the interior piled up high with an immense heap of bricks and charred rafters.
“Est-ce que mon lieutenant voudrait boire un coup?” a sour-visaged Belgian peasant asked me in Ypres one morning. The Germans were shelling the city heavily, and I was inquiring as to the danger spots. The peasant was loading a cart with furniture from a big house in the Rue d’Elverdinghe (one of the principal streets), with the assistance of a mate and under the indulgent eye of a Belgian gendarme. These three men, with my companion and myself, were, I believe, the only human beings in Ypres that day. Standing drinks to strangers is inexpensive in a deserted city where locks no longer serve to imprison bottles in their cellars, and anyway looting is discouraged in the British Army. So, to the speechless amazement of the Belgians, who pointed, with gestures significant of the delights awaiting us, to a large array of ancient, cobwebbed bottles set out on a buhl table, we refused to drink with them. But we went over the house, a treasure-house of old Flemish art, as fine a specimen of a patrician home of the Low Countries as one might wish to see.
The peasants were salving the treasures for the owner, who had fled for refuge to the village of Watou, some twenty miles away. Everything within was in the wildest disorder, and the peasants, with none too tender hand, were piling pell-mell into baskets and crates exquisite specimens of old Flemish pottery, tiles, blown-glass flagons, and wood-carving. I noticed on the floor a lovely old stone drinking-jug inscribed “Iper, 1506”—the sort of jug you see in a Teniers or Jan Steen painting. This family seemed to have thrown nothing away all through the centuries it had lived in the house. In one room a wonderful collection of old children’s toys was scattered about the floor—punchinellos and jack-in-the boxes, with clothes of faded chintz, and little model rooms, complete to the little clock on the wall, enclosed in boxes with glass sides. A shell had come through the roof of the library, a bright and sunny apartment on the top floor, with a charming outlook on the green surroundings of Ypres, and sent the bookshelves and their contents flying before it went on its way through another room on the floor below and out of the house. Old calf-bound tomes were scattered about the place in a smother of brick-dust.
Disaster sometimes overtook the salvage parties. Whilst dodging shells in Ypres one late afternoon, about the hour of the “evening hate,” as our army calls the German evening bombardment, I came upon a large blackened patch opposite the Cloth Hall. As it had not been there on my last visit, I examined it. I did not have to look very closely. The sickening stench of charred human flesh took me by the throat as I approached the patch. A scorched black bowler hat and some fragments of burnt cloth were, with that vapour of the charnel-house, all that were left to show that the remains of a man lay in that horrible heap. There were two charred skulls of horses, some blackened harness chains and calcined parts of a cart. Near by was a jagged lump of cast-iron shell, which lies by me as I write. The cart and horses of one of the salvage parties had obviously been overwhelmed by a shell which, after blowing up driver, horses, and cart, had started a fire which had utterly consumed what the explosion had left.
In past centuries Ypres has been Flemish, French, and Belgian in turn. Whatever her ultimate fate, whether the city be built up again on her ruins or suffered to remain as she is, a perpetual monument of Hunnish malice, henceforth and for all time Ypres will be as British as the impress of the place left on a hundred thousand brains can make it. Wherever I have been all along our winding line I have been plied with questions about Ypres. “We were there in October.” “I was dressed in the asylum there when I got pipped on the Zillebeke ridge.” “What about the Cloth Hall?” “Are the cavalry barracks destroyed?”
The British graves in Ypres—but a fraction of the endless graveyards which the defence of the city has filled in the plain and on the wooded slopes beyond the gates—are a further link between Ypres and the Empire. There is a cluster of wooden crosses in the fields over against the asylum, where I have seen orderlies digging fresh graves when I have passed that way. There are graves on the ramparts, old graves hastily dug in the leaf-mould by the shallow trenches thrown up by the French round the city in October, and new graves, the resting-place of men killed in and about the city when the trees were green with this year’s summer foliage.
Ypres is impregnated with the memory of the British Army. You will find its cartridges ground into the cobble-stones of the streets, you will find its rations strewn about the floors of the abandoned houses, you will find its billeting directions and inscriptions of all kinds scrawled on doors and walls. As I walked down the echoing streets of ruined houses, amid the ghastly odours of the dead wafted insidiously from choked cellars, with German shrapnel bursting viciously about, sent screaming over from two sides of the salient, I found myself thinking that not the tangible signs of the passage of our army, the abandoned equipment and stores, the simple graves, but the city itself, burned, battered, and blasted, is the most moving monument to the heroic self-sacrifice of our men. Rent and torn and blackened, “all tears, like Niobe weeping for her children,” Ypres, uncaptured still, stands, an indestructible witness to our unbroken line.