In those days the Yperlee, a small river, ran open through the town.  But for many generations it has been roofed over and run under the public square.

It was curious to stand on the edge of a great shell hole and look down at the little river, now uncovered to the light of day for the first time in who knows how long.

In all that chaos, with hardly a wall intact, at the corner of what was once the cathedral, stood a heroic marble figure of Burgomaster Vandenpeereboom.  It was quite untouched and as placid as the little river, a benevolent figure rising from the ruins of war.

“They have come like a pestilence,” said the General.  “When they go they will leave nothing.  What they will do is written in what they have done.”

Monsieur le Commandant had disappeared.  Now he returned triumphant, carrying a great bundle in both arms.

“I have been to what was the house of a relative,” he explained.  “He has told me that in the cellar I would find these.  They will interest you.”

“These” proved to be five framed photographs of the great paintings that had decorated the walls of the great Cloth Hall.  Although they had been hidden in a cellar, fragments of shell had broken and torn them.  But it was still possible to gain from them a faint idea of the interior beauty of the old building before its destruction.

I examined them there in the public square, with a shell every now and then screeching above but falling harmlessly far away.

A priest joined us.  He told pathetically of watching the destruction of the Arcade, of seeing one arch after another go down until there was nothing left.

“They ate it,” said the priest graphically.  “A bite at a time.”

We walked through the town.  One street after another opened up its perspective of destruction.  The strange antics that shell fire plays had left doors and lintels standing without buildings, had left intact here and there pieces of furniture.  There was an occasional picture on an exposed wall; iron street lamps had been twisted into travesties; whole panes of glass remained in facades behind which the buildings were gone.  A part of the wooden scaffolding by which repairs were being made to the old tower of the Cloth Hall hung there uninjured by either flame or shell.

On one street all the trees had been cut off as if by one shell, about ten feet above the ground, but in another, where nothing whatever remained but piles of stone and mortar, a great elm had apparently not lost a single branch.

Much has been written about the desolation of these towns.  To get a picture of it one must realise the solidity with which even the private houses are built.  They are stone, or if not, the walls are of massive brick coated with plaster.  There are no frame buildings; wood is too expensive for that purpose.  It is only in prodigal America that we can use wood.

So the destruction of a town there means the destruction of buildings that have stood for centuries, and would in the normal course of events have stood for centuries more.