She gazed at me dully for a minute, and a great fear gripped me, for I saw that her best clothes were torn and dust stained.
"It was near the big hospital on the Poperinghe road," she said in a horribly even voice. "The little one had lingered behind to pick up some bits of coloured glass on the roadside when the shell came. It was a big shell ... and I could find nothing but this," and she held up part of a little torn dress, bloody and terrible.
I tried to utter a few words of comfort, but my horror was too great.
"It is the will of God," she said, as she began to unpack the treasures in the perambulator, but, as I closed the door, I heard her burst into the most awful fit of weeping I have ever known.
And, day by day as the war goes on, the tragedy of Ypres grows greater. Each shell wrecks a little more of what was once a home, each crash and falling of bricks brings a little more pain to a breaking heart. The ruins of Ypres are glorious and noble, and we are proud to defend them, but the quiet, simple people of Ypres cannot even find one brick on another of their homes.
Somewhere in England, they tell me, is a little old lady who was once a great figure in Brussels society. She is nearly eighty now, and alone, but she clings on tenaciously to life till the day shall come when she can go back to her Château at Ypres, where she has lived for forty years. One can picture her—feeble, wizened, and small, her eyes bright with the determination to live until she has seen her home again.
I, who have seen her Château, pray that death may come to close those bright eyes, so that they may never look upon the destruction of her home, for it is a desolate sight, even though the sky was blue and the leaves glistened in the sun on the morning when, two years ago, I tramped up the winding drive.
The lodge was nothing more than a tumbled pile of broken bricks, but, by some odd chance, the Château itself had never suffered a direct hit. In front of the big white house there had once been an asphalt tennis court—there was now a plain pitted at every few yards by huge shell holes. The summer-house at the edge of the wood—once the scene of delightful little flirtations in between the games of tennis—was now a weird wreck, consisting of three tottering walls and a broken seat. Oddest of all, there lay near the white marble steps an old, tyreless De Dion motor-car.
I have often wondered what the history of that battered thing could be. One can almost see the owner packing herself in it with her most precious belongings, to flee from the oncoming Germans. The engine refuses to start, there is no time for repairs, there is the hurried flight on foot, and the car is left to the mercy of the invading troops. Perhaps, again, it belonged to the staff of some army, and was left at the Château when it had run its last possible mile. At all events, there it stood, half-way between Ypres and the Germans, with everything of any possible value stripped off it as thoroughly as though it had been left to the white ants.