A few miles on the opposite side of the town were the German artillery positions, with guns well calculated to destroy Cathedrals and Cloth Halls.  Around these guns were educated men who had spent years—­indeed, most of their lives—­in the scientific study of destruction.  Under these men were slaves who, solely for the purposes of destruction, had ceased to be the free citizens they once were.  These slaves were compelled to carry out any order given to them, under pain of death.  They had, indeed, been explicitly told on the highest earthly authority that, if the order came to destroy their fathers and their brothers, they must destroy their fathers and their brothers:  the instruction was public and historic.  The whole organism has worked, and worked well, for the destruction of all that was beautiful in Ypres, and for the break-up of an honourable tradition extending over at least eight centuries.  The operation was the direct result of an order.  The order had been carefully weighed and considered.  The successful execution of it brought joy into many hearts, high and low.  “Another shell in the Cathedral!” And men shook hands ecstatically around the excellent guns.  “A hole in the tower of the Cloth Hall.”  General rejoicing!  “The population has fled, and Ypres is a desert!” Inexpressible enthusiasm among specially educated men, from the highest to the lowest.  So it must have been.  There was no hazard about the treatment of Ypres.  The shells did not come into Ypres out of nowhere.  Each was the climax of a long, deliberate effort originating in the brains of the responsible leaders.  One is apt to forget all this.

“But,” you say, “this is war, after all.”  After all, it just is.

The future of Ypres exercises the mind.  Ypres is only one among many martyrs.  But, as matters stand at present it is undoubtedly the chief one.  In proportion to their size, scores of villages have suffered as much as Ypres, and some have suffered more.  But no city of its mercantile, historical, and artistic importance has, up to now, suffered in the same degree as Ypres.  Ypres is entitled to rank as the very symbol of the German achievement in Belgium.  It stood upon the path to Calais; but that was not its crime.  Even if German guns had not left one brick upon another in Ypres, the path to Calais would not thereby have been made any easier for the well-shod feet of the apostles of might, for Ypres never served as a military stronghold and could not possibly have so served; and had the Germans known how to beat the British Army in front of Ypres, they could have marched through the city as easily as a hyena through a rice-crop.  The crime of Ypres was that it lay handy for the extreme irritation of an army which, with three times the men and three times the guns, and thirty times the vainglorious conceit, could not shift the trifling force opposed to it last autumn.  Quite naturally the boasters were enraged.  In the end, something had to give way.  And the Cathedral and Cloth Hall and other defenceless splendours of Ypres gave way, not the trenches.  The yearners after Calais did themselves no good by exterminating fine architecture and breaking up innocent homes, but they did experience the relief of smashing something.  Therein lies the psychology of the affair of Ypres, and the reason why the Ypres of history has come to a sudden close.