away rejoicing as soon as their energies are free for rebuilding, Ypres in ruin has still beauty enough and dignity enough to serve—­with the citadel at Verdun—­as the twin symbol of the war.  There was a cloud of jackdaws circling round the great gashed tower where the inner handiwork of the fifteenth-century builders lay open to sky and sun.  I watched them against the blue, gathering in, also, the few details of lovely work that still remain here and there on the face of what was once the splendid Cloth Hall, the glory of these border lands.  And one tried to imagine how men and women would stand there a hundred years hence, amid what developments of this strange new world that the war has brought upon us, and with what thoughts.

Beyond, we were in the wide, shell-pocked waste of the huge battle-field, with many signs on its scarred face of the latest fighting of all, the flooding back of the German tide in last April over these places which it had cost us our best lives to gain, and of the final victorious advance of King Albert and the British Second Army which sent the Germans flying back through Limburg to their own land.  Beside us, the innumerable, water-logged shell-holes, in which, at one time or another in the swaying forward and backward of the fight, the lives of brave men have been so piteously lost, strangled in mud and ooze; here a mere sign-post which tells you where Hooge stood; there the stumps that mark Sanctuary Wood and Polygon Wood, and another sign-post which bears the ever-famous name of Gheluvelt.  In the south-eastern distance rises the spire of Menin church.  And this is the Menin Road.  How it haunted the war news for months and years, like a blood-stained presence!  While to the south-east, I make out Kemmel, Scherpenberg, and the Mont des Cats and in the far north-west a faint line with a few trees on it—­Passchendaele!

Passchendaele!—­name of sorrow and of glory.  What were the British losses, in that three months’ fighting from June to November, 1917, which has been called the “Third Battle of Ypres,” which began with the victory of the Messines ridge and culminated in the Canadian capture of Passchendaele?[4] Outside the inner circle of those who know, there are many figures given.  They are alike only in this that they seem to grow perpetually.  Heroic, heart-breaking wrestle with the old hostile forces of earth and water—­black earth and creeping water and strangling mud!  We won the ridge and we held it till the German advance in April last forced our temporary withdrawal; we had pushed the Germans off the high ground into the marsh lands beyond; but we failed, as everyone knows, in the real strategic objects of the attack, and the losses in the autumn advance on Passchendaele were an important and untoward factor in the spring fighting of 1918.

  [4] Mr. Bonar Law has stated in the House of Commons since these
  lines were written that the losses in the third battle of Ypres,
  from Messines to Passchendaele, July—­October, 1917, were 228,000.