that any had been there. I have seen no
description of it, and I have been asked frequently if it is really
true that the beautiful Cloth Hall is gone--that most famous of all
the famous buildings of Flanders.

Ypres!

What a tragedy! Not a city now; hardly a skeleton of a city. Rumour is
correct, for the wonderful Cloth Hall is gone. There is a fragment
left of the facade, but no repairing can ever restore it. It must all
come down. Indeed, any storm may finish its destruction. The massive
square belfry, two hundred and thirty feet high and topped by its four
turrets, is a shell swaying in every gust of wind.

The inimitable arcade at the end is quite gone. Nothing indeed is left
of either the Cloth Hall, which, built in the year 1200, was the most
remarkable edifice of Belgium, or of the Cathedral behind it, erected
in 1300 to succeed an earlier edifice. General M---- stood by me as I
stared at the ruins of these two great buildings. Something of the
tragedy of Belgium was in his face.

"We were very proud of it," he said. "If we started now to build
another it would take more than seven hundred years to give it
history."

There were shells overhead. But they passed harmlessly, falling either
into the open country or into distant parts of the town. We paid no
attention to them, but my curiosity was roused.

"It seems absurd to continue shelling the town," I said. "There is
nothing left."

Then and there I had a lesson in the new warfare. Bombardment of the
country behind the enemy's trenches is not necessarily to destroy
towns. Its strategical purpose, I was told, is to cut off
communications, to prevent, if possible, the bringing up of reserve
troops and transport wagons, to destroy ammunition trains. I was new
to war, with everything to learn. This perfectly practical explanation
had not occurred to me.

"But how do they know when an ammunition train is coming?" I asked.

"There are different methods. Spies, of course, always. And aeroplanes
also."

"But an ammunition train moves."

It was necessary then to explain the various methods by which
aeroplanes signal, giving ranges and locations. I have seen since that
time the charts carried by aviators and airship crews, in which every
hedge, every ditch, every small detail of the landscape is carefully
marked. In the maps I have seen the region is divided into lettered
squares, each square made up of four small squares, numbered. Thus B 3
means the thi