It existed no longer as a place of ancient beauty in which men and
women made their homes, trustful of fate. Many of its houses had
fallen into the roadways and heaped them high with broken bricks
and shattered glass. Others burned with a fine, fierce glow inside the
outer walls. The roofs had crashed down into the cellars. All between,
furniture and panelling and household treasures, had been burnt out
into black ash or mouldered in glowing embers.
The great Cloth Hall, which had been one of the most magnificent
treasures of ancient architecture in Europe, was smashed and
battered by incessant shells, so that it became one vast ruin of
broken walls and fallen pillars framed about a scrapheap of twisted
iron and calcined statues, when one day later in the war I wandered
for an hour or more, groping for some little relic which would tell the
tale of this tragedy.
On my desk now at home there are a few long, rusty nails, an old lock
of fifteenth-century workmanship, and a little broken window with
leaded panes, which serve as mementoes of this destruction.
The inhabitants of Ypres had gone, unless some of them were hiding,
or buried in their cellars. A few dogs roamed about, barking or
whining at the soldiers who passed through the outskirts staring at all
this destruction with curious eyes, and storing up images for which
they will never find the right words.
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