indoors.




ON A CITY THAT WAS


I saw in a newspaper a few days ago some pictures of the ruins of the Cloth
Hall and the Cathedral at Ypres. They were excellent photographs, but the
impression they left on my mind was of the futility even of photography to
convey any real sense of that astonishing scene of desolation which was
once the beautiful city of Ypres. We talk of Ypres as if it were still a
city in being, in which men trade, and children play, and women go about
their household duties. In a vague way we feel that it is so. In a vague
way I felt that it was so myself until I entered it and found myself in the
presence of the ghost of a city.

How wonderful is the solitude and the silence in the midst of which it
stands like the ruin of some ancient and forgotten civilisation. Far behind
you have left the hurry and tumult of the great armies--every village
seething with a strange and tumultuous life, soldiers bargaining with the
women for potatoes and cabbages in the marketplace, boiling their pots in
the fields, playing football by the way side, mending the roads, marching,
camping, feeding, sleeping; officers flying along the roads on horseback or
in motorcars, vast processions of lorries coiling their way over the
landscape, or standing at rest with their death-dealing burdens while the
men take their mid-day meal; giant "caterpillars" dragging great guns along
the highway. Everywhere the sense of a fearful urgency, everywhere the
feeling of a brooding and awful presence that overshadows the heavens with