cicerone, "so before going to
La Panne, where quarters have been reserved for you, I shall take you
to Furnes. The Grande Place is pure Spanish--it was built in the Duke
of Alva's time, you know--and it is very beautiful by moonlight."

The road to Furnes took us through what had been, a few years before,
quaint Flemish villages, but German _Kultur_, aided by the products of
Frau Bertha Krupp, had transformed the beautiful sixteenth-century
architecture into heaps of brick and stone. And nowhere did I see a
church left standing. Whether the Germans shelled the churches because
they honestly believed that their towers were used for observation
purposes, or from sheer lust for destruction, I do not know. In any
event, the churches are gone. In one little shell-torn village my
companion pointed out to me the ruins of a church, amid which a
company of infantry, going up to the trenches, had camped for the
night. Just as the men were falling in at daybreak a German shell of
large caliber exploded among them. Sixty-four--I think that was the
number--were killed outright or died of their wounds. But not even the
dead are permitted to sleep in peace. I saw several churchyards on
which German shells had rained so heavily that the corpses had been
disinterred, and whitened bones and grinning skulls littered the
ploughed-up ground.

Darkness had fallen when we came to Furnes. In passing through the
outskirts, we stopped to call on two young women--an Irish girl and a
Canadian--who, undismayed by the periodic shell-storms which visit it,
have pluckily stayed in the town ever since the battle of the Yser,
caring for the few hundred townspeople who remain, nursing the
wounded, and even conducting a school for the children. They live in a
small bungalow which the military authorities have erected for them on
the edge of the town. A few yards from their front door is a
bomb-proof, looking exactly like a Kansas cyclone-cellar, in which
they find refuge when one of the frequent bombardments begins. We
found that the young women were not at home. I was disappointed,
because I wanted to tell them how much I admired them.

My companion was quite right in saying that the Grande Place of Furnes
by moonlight is worth seeing. It certainly is. The exquisite
fifteenth-century buildings which face upon the square have, by some
miracle, remained almost undamaged. There were no lights, of course,
and the only person in sight was a sentry, on who