ground at one side of the road, and thrown up a mass of earth and stones on to the roof of an asylum on the other side of the road.  The building was unharmed; the well-paved surface of the road was perfect—­it had received no hurt; but on the roof lay the earth and stones.  Still, we had almost no feeling of danger.  The chances were a thousand to one that the picture-frame maker would get safely away with his goods; and he did.  But it seemed odd—­to an absurdly sensitive, non-Teutonic mind it seemed somehow to lack justice—­ that the picture-framer, after having been ruined, must risk his life in order to snatch from the catastrophe the debris of his career.  Further on, within the city itself, but near the edge of it, two men were removing uninjured planks from the upper floor of a house; the planks were all there was in the house to salve.  I saw no other attempt to make the best of a bad job, and, after I had inspected the bad job, these two attempts appeared heroic to the point of mere folly.

I had not been in Ypres for nearly twenty years, and when I was last there the work of restoring the historic buildings of the city was not started. (These restorations, especially to the Cloth Hall and the Cathedral of St. Martin, were just about finished in time for the opening of hostilities, and they give yet another proof of the German contention that Belgium, in conspiracy with Britain, had deliberately prepared for the war—­and, indeed, wanted it!) he Grande Place was quite recognisable.  It is among the largest public squares in Europe, and one of the very few into which you could put a medium-sized Atlantic liner.  There is no square in London or (I think) New York into which you could put a 10,000-ton boat.  A 15,000-ton affair, such as even the Arabic, could be arranged diagonally in the Grande Place at Ypres.

This Grande Place has seen history.  In the middle of the thirteenth century, whence its chief edifices date, it was the centre of one of the largest and busiest towns in Europe, and a population of 200,000 weavers was apt to be uproarious in it.  Within three centuries a lack of comprehension of home politics and the simple brigandage of foreign politics had reduced Ypres to a population of 5,000.  In the seventeenth century Ypres fell four times.  At the beginning of the nineteenth century it ceased to be a bishopric.  In the middle of the nineteenth century it ceased to be fortified; and in the second decade of the twentieth century it ceased to be inhabited.  Possessing 200,000 inhabitants in the thirteenth century, 5,000 inhabitants in the sixteenth century, 17400 inhabitants at the end of the nineteenth century, it now possesses 0 inhabitants.  It is uninhabited.  It cannot be inhabited.  Scarcely two months before I saw it, the city—­I was told—­had been full of life; in the long period of calm which followed the bombardment of the railway-station quarter in November 1914 the inhabitants had taken courage, and many of those who had fled from the first shells had sidled back again with the most absurd hope in their hearts.  As late as the third week in April the Grande Place was the regular scene of commerce, and on market-days it was dotted with stalls upon which were offered for sale such frivolous things as postcards displaying the damage done to the railway-station quarter.