hanging in fragments, bedsteads tumbling down through the broken ceiling of
the sitting-room, pictures askew on the tottering walls, household
treasures a forlorn wreckage, hats still hanging on the hat-pegs, the
table-cloth still laid, the fireplace lustreless with the ashes of the last
fire.

And in the centre of this scene of utter misery the Cathedral and the Cloth
Hall, still towering above the general desolation, sublime even in their
ruin, the roofs gone, the interiors a heap of rubbish--the rubbish of
priceless things--the outer walls battered and broken, but standing as they
have stood for centuries. Most wonderful of all, as I saw it, a single
pinnacle of the Cloth Hall still standing above the wreck, slender and
exquisitely carven, pointing like an accusing finger to the eternal
tribunal. For long the Germans had been shelling that Finger of Ypres. They
shelled it the afternoon I was there and filled the market-place with great
masses of masonry from the walls. But they shelled it in vain, and as I
left Ypres in the twilight, when the thunder of the guns had ceased, and
looked back on the great mound of "the city that was," I saw above the
ruins the finger still pointing heavenward.

But if the solitude of Ypres is memorable, the silence is terrible. It is
the silence of imminent and breathless things, full of strange secrets,
thrilling with a fearful expectation, broken by sudden and shattering
voices that speak and then are still--voices that seem to come out of the
bowels of the earth near at hand and are answered by voices more distant,
the vicious hiss of the shrapnel, the crisp rattle of the machine-guns, the
roar of "Mother," that sounds like an invisible express train thundering
through the sky above you. The solitude and the silence assume an
oppressive significance. They are only the garment of the mighty mystery
that envelops you. You feel that these dead walls have ears, eyes, and most