ll,
the highest thing in Ypres. The tower is a skeleton. As for the rest of
the building, it may be said that some of the walls alone substantially
remain. The choir--the earliest part of the Cathedral--is entirely
unroofed, and its south wall has vanished. The apse has been
blown clean out. The Early Gothic nave is partly unroofed. The
transepts are unroofed, and of the glass of the memorable rose
window of the south transept not a trace is left--so far as I can
remember.

In the centre of the Cathedral, where the transepts meet, is a vast
heap of bricks, stone, and powdery dirt. This heap rises irregularly
like a range of hills towards the choir; it overspreads most of the
immense interior, occupying an area of, perhaps, from 15,000 to
20,000 square feet. In the choir it rises to a height of six or seven
yards. You climb perilously over it as you might cross the Alps. This
incredible amorphous mass, made up of millions of defaced
architectural fragments of all kinds, is the shattered body of about
half the Cathedral. I suppose that the lovely carved choir-stalls are
imbedded somewhere within it. The grave of Jansen is certainly at
the bottom of it. The aspect of the scene, with the sky above, the
jagged walls, the interrupted arches, and the dusty piled mess all
around, is intolerably desolate. And it is made the more so by the
bright colours of the great altar, two-thirds of which is standing, and
the still brighter colours of the organ, which still clings, apparently
whole, to the north wall of the choir. In the sacristy are collected gilt
candelabra and other altar-furniture, turned yellow by the fumes of
picric acid. At a little distance the Cathedral, ruin though it is, seems
solid enough; but when you are in it the fear is upon you that the
inconstant and fragile remains of it may collapse about you in a gust
of wind a little rougher than usual.

You leave the outraged fane with relief. And when you get outside
you have an excellent opportunity of estimating the mechanism
which brought about this admirable triumph of destruction; for there
is a hole made by a 17-inch shell; it is at a moderate estimate fifty
feet across, and it has happened to tumble into a graveyard, so that
the hole is littered with the white bones of earlier Christians.

The Cloth Hall was a more wonderful thing than the Cathedral of St.
Martin, which, after all, was no better than dozens of other
cathedrals. There was only one Cloth Hall