We had seen other ruined towns, but none like this.  The towns of Lorraine were blown up, burnt down, deliberately erased from the earth.  At worst they are like stone-yards, at best like Pompeii.  But Ypres has been bombarded to death, and the outer walls of its houses are still standing, so that it presents the distant semblance of a living city, while near by it is seen to be a disembowelled corpse.  Every window-pane is smashed, nearly every building unroofed, and some house-fronts are sliced clean off, with the different stories exposed, as if for the stage-setting of a farce.  In these exposed interiors the poor little household gods shiver and blink like owls surprised in a hollow tree.  A hundred signs of intimate and humble tastes, of humdrum pursuits, of family association, cling to the unmasked walls.  Whiskered photographs fade on morning-glory wallpapers, plaster saints pine under glass bells, antimacassars droop from plush sofas, yellowing diplomas display their seals on office walls.  It was all so still and familiar that it seemed as if the people for whom these things had a meaning might at any moment come back and take up their daily business.  And then—­crash! the guns began, slamming out volley after volley all along the English lines, and the poor frail web of things that had made up the lives of a vanished city-full hung dangling before us in that deathly blast.

We had just reached the square before the Cathedral when the cannonade began, and its roar seemed to build a roof of iron over the glorious ruins of Ypres.  The singular distinction of the city is that it is destroyed but not abased.  The walls of the Cathedral, the long bulk of the Cloth Market, still lift themselves above the market place with a majesty that seems to silence compassion.  The sight of those facades, so proud in death, recalled a phrase used soon after the fall of Liege by Belgium’s Foreign Minister—­“La Belgique ne regrette rien “—­which ought some day to serve as the motto of the renovated city.

We were turning to go when we heard a whirr overhead, followed by a volley of mitrailleuse.  High up in the blue, over the centre of the dead city, flew a German aeroplane; and all about it hundreds of white shrapnel tufts burst out in the summer sky like the miraculous snow-fall of Italian legend.  Up and up they flew, on the trail of the Taube, and on flew the Taube, faster still, till quarry and pack were lost in mist, and the barking of the mitrailleuse died out.  So we left Ypres to the death-silence in which we had found her.

The afternoon carried us back to Poperinghe, where I was bound on a quest for lace-cushions of the special kind required by our Flemish refugees.  The model is unobtainable in France, and I had been told—­with few and vague indications—­that I might find the cushions in a certain convent of the city.  But in which?