labelled: "It is dangerous to dig among these ruins." But there was no
one digging when we were there--no one moving, except ourselves. Ypres
seemed to me beyond recovery as a town, just as Lens is; but whereas
Lens is just a shapeless ugliness which men will clear away rejoicing
as soon as their energies are free for rebuilding, Ypres in ruin has
still beauty enough and dignity enough to serve--with the citadel at
Verdun--as the twin symbol of the war. There was a cloud of jackdaws
circling round the great gashed tower where the inner handiwork of the
fifteenth-century builders lay open to sky and sun. I watched them
against the blue, gathering in, also, the few details of lovely work
that still remain here and there on the face of what was once the
splendid Cloth Hall, the glory of these border lands. And one tried to
imagine how men and women would stand there a hundred years hence,
amid what developments of this strange new world that the war has
brought upon us, and with what thoughts.

Beyond, we were in the wide, shell-pocked waste of the huge
battle-field, with many signs on its scarred face of the latest
fighting of all, the flooding back of the German tide in last April
over these places which it had cost us our best lives to gain, and of
the final victorious advance of King Albert and the British Second
Army which sent the Germans flying back through Limburg to their own
land. Beside us, the innumerable, water-logged shell-holes, in which,
at one time or another in the swaying forward and backward of the
fight, the lives of brave men have been so piteously lost, strangled
in mud and ooze; here a mere sign-post which tells you where Hooge
stood; there the stumps that mark Sanctuary Wood and Polygon Wood, and
another sign-post which bears the ever-famous name of Gheluvelt. In
the south-eastern distance rises the spire of Menin church. And this
is _the Menin Road_. How it haunted the war news for months and years,