first stars that glimmered in a pale sky, the
frightful beauty of the ruins put a spell upon us.

The tower of the cathedral rose high above the framework of broken
arches and single pillars, like a white rock which had been split from
end to end by a thunderbolt. A recent shell had torn out a slice so that
the top of the tower was supported only upon broken buttresses, and the
great pile was hollowed out like a decayed tooth. The Cloth Hall was but
a skeleton in stone, with immense gaunt ribs about the dead carcass of
its former majesty. Beyond, the tower of St. Mark's was a stark ruin,
which gleamed white through the darkening twilight.

We felt as men who should stand gazing upon the ruins of Westminster
Abbey, while the shadows of night crept into their dark caverns and into
their yawning chasms of chaotic masonry, with a gleam of moon upon their
riven towers and fingers of pale light touching the ribs of isolated
arches. In the spaciousness of the Grande Place at Ypres my friend and I
stood like the last men on earth in a city of buried life.

It was almost dark now as we made our way through other streets of
rubbish heaps. Strangely enough, as I remember, many of the iron
lamp-posts had been left standing, though bent and twisted in a drunken
way, and here and there we caught the sweet whiff of flowers and plants
still growing in gardens which had not been utterly destroyed by the
daily tempest of shells, though the houses about them had been all
wrecked.

The woods below the ramparts were slashed and torn by these storms, and
in the darkness, lightened faintly by the crescent moon, we stumbled
over broken branches and innumerable shell-holes. The silence was broken
now by the roar of a gun, which sounded so loud that I jumped sideways
with the sudden shock of it. It seemed to be the signal for our
batteries, and shell after shell went rushing through the night, with
that long, menacing hiss which ends in a dull blast.

The reports of the guns and the explosions of the shells followed each
other, and mingled in an enormous tumult, echoed back by the ruins of
Ypres in hollow, reverberating thunder-strokes. The enemy was answering
back, not very fiercely yet, and from the center of the town, in or
about the Grande Place, came the noise of falling houses or of huge
blocks of stone splitting into fragments.

We groped along, scared with the sense of death around us. The first
flares of the night were being ligh