The Cloth Hall was a more wonderful thing than the Cathedral of St. Martin, which, after all, was no better than dozens of other cathedrals.  There was only one Cloth Hall of the rank of this one.  It is not easy to say whether or not the Cloth Hall still exists.  Its celebrated three-story facade exists, with a huge hiatus in it to the left of the middle, and, of course, minus all glass.  The entire facade seemed to me to be leaning slightly forward; I could not decide whether this was an optical delusion or a fact.  The enormous central tower is knocked to pieces, and yet conserves some remnant of its original outlines; bits of scaffolding on the sides of it stick out at a great height like damaged matches.  The slim corner towers are scarcely hurt.  Everything of artistic value in the structure of the interior has disappeared in a horrible confusion of rubble.  The eastern end of the Cloth Hall used to be terminated by a small beautiful Renaissance edifice called the Niewwerk, dating from the seventeenth century.  What its use was I never knew; but the Niewwerk has vanished, and the Town Hall next door has also vanished; broken walls, a few bits of arched masonry, and heaps of refuse alone indicate where these buildings stood in April last.

So much for the two principal buildings visible from the Grande Place.  The Cloth Hall is in the Grande Place, and the Cathedral adjoins it.  The only other fairly large building in the Place is the Hopital de Notre Dame at the north-east end.  This white-painted erection, with its ornamental gilt sign, had continued substantially to exist as a structural entity; it was defaced, but not seriously.  Every other building in the place was smashed up.  To walk right round the Place is to walk nearly half a mile; and along the entire length, with the above exceptions, there was nothing but mounds of rubbish and fragments of upstanding walls.  Here and there in your perambulation you may detect an odour with which certain trenches have already familiarised you.  Obstinate inhabitants were apt to get buried in the cellars where they had taken refuge.  In one place what looked like a colossal sewer had been uncovered.  I thought at the time that the sewer was somewhat large for a city of the size of Ypres, and it has since occurred to me that this sewer may have been the ancient bed of the stream Yperlee, which in some past period was arched over.

“I want to make a rough sketch of all this,” I said to my companions in the middle of the Grande Place, indicating the Cloth Hall, and the Cathedral, and other grouped ruins.  The spectacle was, indeed, majestic in the extreme, and if the British Government has not had it officially photographed in the finest possible manner, it has failed in a very obvious duty; detailed photographs of Ypres ought to be distributed throughout the world.