At the time of my visit few civilians had seen the city of Ypres since its destruction.  I am not sure that any had been there.  I have seen no description of it, and I have been asked frequently if it is really true that the beautiful Cloth Hall is gone—­that most famous of all the famous buildings of Flanders.

Ypres!

What a tragedy!  Not a city now; hardly a skeleton of a city.  Rumour is correct, for the wonderful Cloth Hall is gone.  There is a fragment left of the facade, but no repairing can ever restore it.  It must all come down.  Indeed, any storm may finish its destruction.  The massive square belfry, two hundred and thirty feet high and topped by its four turrets, is a shell swaying in every gust of wind.

The inimitable arcade at the end is quite gone.  Nothing indeed is left of either the Cloth Hall, which, built in the year 1200, was the most remarkable edifice of Belgium, or of the Cathedral behind it, erected in 1300 to succeed an earlier edifice.  General M——­ stood by me as I stared at the ruins of these two great buildings.  Something of the tragedy of Belgium was in his face.

“We were very proud of it,” he said.  “If we started now to build another it would take more than seven hundred years to give it history.”

There were shells overhead.  But they passed harmlessly, falling either into the open country or into distant parts of the town.  We paid no attention to them, but my curiosity was roused.

“It seems absurd to continue shelling the town,” I said.  “There is nothing left.”

Then and there I had a lesson in the new warfare.  Bombardment of the country behind the enemy’s trenches is not necessarily to destroy towns.  Its strategical purpose, I was told, is to cut off communications, to prevent, if possible, the bringing up of reserve troops and transport wagons, to destroy ammunition trains.  I was new to war, with everything to learn.  This perfectly practical explanation had not occurred to me.

“But how do they know when an ammunition train is coming?” I asked.

“There are different methods.  Spies, of course, always.  And aeroplanes also.”

“But an ammunition train moves.”

It was necessary then to explain the various methods by which aeroplanes signal, giving ranges and locations.  I have seen since that time the charts carried by aviators and airship crews, in which every hedge, every ditch, every small detail of the landscape is carefully marked.  In the maps I have seen the region is divided into lettered squares, each square made up of four small squares, numbered.  Thus B 3 means the third block of the B division, and so on.  By wireless or in other ways the message is sent to the batteries, and B 3, along which an ammunition train is moving, suddenly finds itself under fire.  Thus ended the second lesson!

An ammunition train, having safely escaped B 3 and all the other terrors that are spread for such as it, rumbled by, going through the Square.  The very vibration of its wheels as they rattled along the street set parts of the old building to shaking.  Stones fell.  It was not safe to stand near the belfry.