ion to inevitable death. After a lull for burning and burial, for
the refilling of great gaps in regiments and divisions, the enemy
moved against us with new masses, but again death awaited them, in
spite of all their guns, and the British held their ground.

They held their ground with superb and dauntless valour, and out of
the general horror of it all there emerges the fine, bright chivalry of
young officers and men who did amazing deeds, which read like fairy
tales, even when they are told soberly in official dispatches. In this
slaughter field the individual still found a chance now and then of
personal prowess, and not all his human qualities had been
annihilated or stupefied by the overwhelming power of artillery.

23

The town of Ypres was added to the list of other Belgian towns like
those in which I saw the ruin of a nation.

It existed no longer as a place of ancient beauty in which men and
women made their homes, trustful of fate. Many of its houses had
fallen into the roadways and heaped them high with broken bricks
and shattered glass. Others burned with a fine, fierce glow inside the
outer walls. The roofs had crashed down into the cellars. All between,
furniture and panelling and household treasures, had been burnt out
into black ash or mouldered in glowing embers.

The great Cloth Hall, which had been one of the most magnificent
treasures of ancient architecture in Europe, was smashed and
battered by incessant shells, so that it became one vast ruin of
broken walls and fallen pillars framed about a scrapheap of twisted
iron and calcined statues, when one day later in the war I wandered
for an hour or more, groping for some little relic which would tell the
tale of this tragedy.

On my desk now at home there are a few long, rusty nails, an old lock
of fifteenth-century workmanship, and a little broken window with
leaded panes, which serve as mementoes of this destruction.

The inhabitants of Ypres had gone, unless some of them were hiding,
or buried in their cellars. A few dogs roamed about, barking or
whining at the soldiers who passed through the outskirts staring at all
this destruction with curious eyes, and storing up images for which
they will never find the right words.

Two young naval officers who went into Ypres one day tried to coax
one of the dogs to come with them. "Might have brought us luck,"
they said, hiding their pity for a poor beast. But it slunk back into the
ruin of it