It existed no longer as a place of ancient beauty in which men and women made their homes, trustful of fate.  Many of its houses had fallen into the roadways and heaped them high with broken bricks and shattered glass.  Others burned with a fine, fierce glow inside the outer walls.  The roofs had crashed down into the cellars.  All between, furniture and panelling and household treasures, had been burnt out into black ash or mouldered in glowing embers.

The great Cloth Hall, which had been one of the most magnificent treasures of ancient architecture in Europe, was smashed and battered by incessant shells, so that it became one vast ruin of broken walls and fallen pillars framed about a scrapheap of twisted iron and calcined statues, when one day later in the war I wandered for an hour or more, groping for some little relic which would tell the tale of this tragedy.

On my desk now at home there are a few long, rusty nails, an old lock of fifteenth-century workmanship, and a little broken window with leaded panes, which serve as mementoes of this destruction.

The inhabitants of Ypres had gone, unless some of them were hiding, or buried in their cellars.  A few dogs roamed about, barking or whining at the soldiers who passed through the outskirts staring at all this destruction with curious eyes, and storing up images for which they will never find the right words.

Two young naval officers who went into Ypres one day tried to coax one of the dogs to come with them.  “Might have brought us luck,” they said, hiding their pity for a poor beast.  But it slunk back into the ruin of its master’s house, distrustful of men who did things not belonging to the code of beasts.

24

Human qualities were not annihilated, I have said.  Yet in a general way that was the effect of modern weapons, and at Ypres masses of men did not fight so much as stand until they died.

“We just wait for death,” said a Belgian officer one night, “and wonder if it doesn’t reach us out of all this storm of shells.  It is a war without soul or adventure.  In the early days, when I scoured the country with a party of motor scouts there was some sport in it.  Any audacity we had, or any cunning, could get some kind of payment.  The individual counted.”

“But now, in the business round Ypres, what can men do—­infantry, cavalry, scouts?  It is the gun that does all the business heaving out shells, delivering death in a merciless way.  It is guns, with men as targets, helpless as the leaves that are torn from these autumn trees around us by a storm of hail.  Our men are falling like the leaves, and the ground is heaped with them, and there is no decisive victory on either side.  One week of death is followed by another week of death.  The position changes a little, that is all, and the business goes on again.  It is appalling.”

The same words were used to me on the same night by a surgeon who had just come from the station of Dunkirk, where the latest batch of wounded—­a thousand of them—­were lying on the straw.  “It is appalling,” he said.  “The destruction of this shell-fire is making a shambles of human bodies.  How can we cope with it?  What can we do with such a butchery?”