Then came the major bombardment, which is not yet over.

You may obtain a just idea of the effects of the major bombardment by adventuring into the interior of the Cathedral of St. Martin.  This Cathedral is chiefly thirteenth-century work.  Its tower, like that of the Cathedral at Malines, had never been completed—­nor will it ever be, now—­but it is still, with the exception of the tower of the Cloth Hall, the highest thing in Ypres.  The tower is a skeleton.  As for the rest of the building, it may be said that some of the walls alone substantially remain.  The choir—­the earliest part of the Cathedral—­is entirely unroofed, and its south wall has vanished.  The apse has been blown clean out.  The Early Gothic nave is partly unroofed.  The transepts are unroofed, and of the glass of the memorable rose window of the south transept not a trace is left—­so far as I can remember.

In the centre of the Cathedral, where the transepts meet, is a vast heap of bricks, stone, and powdery dirt.  This heap rises irregularly like a range of hills towards the choir; it overspreads most of the immense interior, occupying an area of, perhaps, from 15,000 to 20,000 square feet.  In the choir it rises to a height of six or seven yards.  You climb perilously over it as you might cross the Alps.  This incredible amorphous mass, made up of millions of defaced architectural fragments of all kinds, is the shattered body of about half the Cathedral.  I suppose that the lovely carved choir-stalls are imbedded somewhere within it.  The grave of Jansen is certainly at the bottom of it.  The aspect of the scene, with the sky above, the jagged walls, the interrupted arches, and the dusty piled mess all around, is intolerably desolate.  And it is made the more so by the bright colours of the great altar, two-thirds of which is standing, and the still brighter colours of the organ, which still clings, apparently whole, to the north wall of the choir.  In the sacristy are collected gilt candelabra and other altar-furniture, turned yellow by the fumes of picric acid.  At a little distance the Cathedral, ruin though it is, seems solid enough; but when you are in it the fear is upon you that the inconstant and fragile remains of it may collapse about you in a gust of wind a little rougher than usual.

You leave the outraged fane with relief.  And when you get outside you have an excellent opportunity of estimating the mechanism which brought about this admirable triumph of destruction; for there is a hole made by a 17-inch shell; it is at a moderate estimate fifty feet across, and it has happened to tumble into a graveyard, so that the hole is littered with the white bones of earlier Christians.