I was surprised to see anything at all of the once beautiful Cloth Hall.  We took some snaps of the remains.  A lot of discoloured bones were lying about among the debris disinterred from the cemetery by the bombardments.

Heaps of powdered bricks were all that remained of many of the houses.  The town gasometer had evidently been blown completely into the air, what was left of it was perched on its head in a drunken fashion.

Beyond the gate of the town on the Menin Road stood a large unpainted wooden shanty.  I wondered what it could be and thought it was possibly a Y.M.C.A. hut.  Imagine my surprise on closer inspection to see painted over the door in large black letters “Ypriana Hotel”!  It had been put up by an enterprising Belge.  Somehow it seemed a desecration to see this cheap little building on that sacred spot.

The Ypres-Menin Road stretched in front of us as far as the eye could see, disappearing into the horizon.  On either hand was No-man’s-land.  I had seen wrecked villages on the Belgian front in 1915 and was more or less accustomed to the sight, but this was different.  It was more terrible than any ruins I had ever seen.  For utter desolation I never want to behold anything worse.

The ground was pock-marked with shell-holes and craters.  Old tanks lay embedded in the mud, their sides pierced by shot and shell, and worst of all by far were the trees.  Mere skeletons of trees standing gaunt and jagged, stripped naked of their bark; mute testimony of the horrors they had witnessed.  Surely of all the lonely places of the earth this was by far the worst?  The ground looked lighter in some places than in others, where the powdered bricks alone showed where a village had once stood.  There were those whose work it was to search for the scattered graves and bring them in to one large cemetery.  Just beyond “Hell-fire Corner” a padre was conducting a burial service over some such of these where a cemetery had been formed.  We next passed Birr Cross Roads with “Sanctuary Wood” on our left.  Except that the lifeless trees seemed to be more numerous, nothing was left to indicate a wood had ever been there.

The more I saw the more I marvelled to think how the men could exist in such a place and not go mad, yet we were seeing it under the most ideal conditions with the fresh green grass shooting up to cover the ugly rents and scars.

Many of the craters half-filled with water already had duckweed growing.  Words are inadequate to express the horror and loneliness of that place which seemed peopled only by the ghosts of those “Beloved soldiers, who love rough life and breath, not less for dying faithful to the last.”

We drove on to Hooge and turned near Geluvelt, making our way back silently along that historic road which had been kept in repair by gangs of workmen whose job it was to fill in the shell holes as fast as they were made.