Perhaps the chief street in Ypres is the wide Rue de Lille, which runs from opposite the Cloth Hall down to the Lille Gate, and over the moat water into the Lille road and on to the German lines.  The Rue de Lille was especially famous for its fine old buildings.  There was the Hospice Belle, for old female paupers of Ypres, built in the thirteenth century.  There was the Museum, formerly the Hotel Merghelynck, not a very striking edifice, but full of antiques of all kinds.  There was the Hospital of St. John, interesting, but less interesting than the Hospital of St. John at Bruges.  There was the Gothic Maison de Bois, right at the end of the street, with a rather wonderful frontage.  And there was the famous fourteenth-century Steenen, which since my previous visit had been turned into the post office.  With the exception of this last building, the whole of the Rue de Lille, if my memory is right, lay in ruins.  The shattered post office was splendidly upright, and in appearance entire; but, for all I know, its interior may have been destroyed by a shell through the roof.  Only the acacia-trees flourished, and the flies, and the weeds between the stones of the paving.  The wind took up the dust from the rubbish heaps which had been houses and wreathed it against what bits of walls still maintained the perpendicular.  Here, too, was the unforgettable odour, rising through the interstices of the smashed masonry which hid subterranean chambers.

We turned into a side-street of small houses—­probably the homes of lace-makers.  The street was too humble to be a mark for the guns of the Germans, who, no doubt, trained their artillery by the aid of a very large scale municipal map on which every building was separately indicated.  It would seem impossible that a map of less than a foot to a mile could enable them to produce such wonderful results of carefully wanton destruction.  And the assumption must be that the map was obtained from the local authorities by some agent masquerading as a citizen.  I heard, indeed, that known citizens of all the chief towns returned to their towns or to the vicinity thereof in the uniform and with the pleasing manners of German warriors.  The organisation for doing good to Belgium against Belgium’s will was an incomparable piece of chicane and pure rascality.  Strange—­Belgians were long ago convinced that the visitation was inevitably coming, and had fallen into the habit of discussing it placidly over their beer at nights.

To return to the side-street.  So far as one could see, it had not received a dent, not a scratch.  Even the little windows of the little red houses were by no means all broken.  All the front doors stood ajar.  I hesitated to walk in, for these houses seemed to be mysteriously protected by influences invisible.  But in the end the vulgar, yet perhaps legitimate, curiosity of the sightseer, of the professional reporter, drove me within the doors.  The houses were so modest that they had no entrance-halls or