ntense. The very breath of the volcano seems to fan your cheek, and the
hollow roar has become near and plangent. It is no longer like the breaking
of great seas on a distant shore: it is like thunder rending the sky above
you. A little further, and another subtle change is observable. On either
hand the land has become solitary and unkempt. All the life of the fields
has vanished and the soldiers are in undisputed possession. Then even the
soldiers seem left behind, and you enter the strange solitude where the war
is waged. Before you rises the great mound of Ypres. In the distance it
looks like a living city with quaintly broken skyline, but as you approach
you see that it is only the tomb of a city standing there desolate and
shattered in the midst of a universal desolation.

It is midday as you pass through its streets, but there is no moving thing
visible amidst the ruins. The very spirit of loneliness is about you--not
the invigorating loneliness of the mountain tops, but the sad loneliness of
the grave. I have stood upon the ruins of Carthage, but even there I did
not feel the same sense of solitude that I felt as I walked the streets of
Ypres. There, at least, the birds were singing above you, and the Arab sat
beside his camel on the grass in the sunshine. Here nature itself seems
blasted by some dreadful flame of death. The streets preserve their
contours, but on either side the houses stand like gaunt skeletons,
roofless and shattered, fronts knocked out, floors smashed through or
hanging in fragments, bedsteads tumbling down through the broken ceiling of
the sitting-room, pictures askew on the tottering walls, household
treasures a forlorn wreckage, hats still hanging on the hat-pegs, the
table-cloth still laid, the fireplace lustreless with the ashes of the last
fire.

And in the centre of this scene of utter misery the Cathedral and the Cloth
Hall, still towering above the general desolation, sublime even in their
ruin, the roofs gone, the interiors a heap of rubbish--the rubbish of
priceless things--the outer walls battered and broken, but standing as they
have stood for centuries. Most wonderful of all, as I saw it, a single
pinnacle of the Cloth Hall still standing above the wreck, slender and
exquisitely carven, pointing like an accusing finger to the eternal
tribunal. For long the Germans had been shelling that Finger of Ypres. They
shelled it the afternoon I was there and filled the market-place with g