approach the actual firing-line on the British front, were not like
other hours; and, perhaps, from much thinking of them, the Salient and
the approaches to it, as I saw them in 1916 from the Scherpenberg
hill, had become a constant image in the mind. Only, instead of seeing
Ypres from the shelter of the Scherpenberg Windmill, as a distant
phantom in the horizon mists, beyond the shell-bursts in the
battle-field below us, we were now to go through Ypres itself, then
wholly forbidden ground, and out beyond it into some of the
ever-famous battle-fields that lie north and south of the Ypres-Menin
road.

One hears much talk in Paris of the multitudes who will come to see
the great scenes of the war, as soon as peace is signed, when the
railways are in a better state, and the food problems less, if not
solved. The multitudes indeed have every right to come, for it is
nations, not standing armies, that have won this war. But, personally,
one may be glad to have seen these sacred places again, during this
intermediate period of utter solitude and desolation, when their very
loneliness "makes deep silence in the heart--for thought to do its
part." The roads in January were clear, and the Army gone. The only
visitors were a few military cars, and men of the salvage corps,
directing German prisoners in the gathering up of live shells and
hand-grenades, of tons of barbed wire and trip wire, and all the other
_débris_ of battle that still lie thick upon the ground. In a few
months perhaps there will be official guides conducting parties
through the ruins, and in a year or two, the ruins of Ypres themselves
may have given place to the rising streets of a new city. As they now
are, a strange and sinister majesty surrounds them. At the entrance to
the town there still hangs the notice: "Troops are not to enter Ypres
except on special duty"; and the grass-grown heaps of masonry are